Excavating Unearthed Arcana that Didn’t Make the Cut, Part 1

Courtesy of the Dungeons & Dragons design team’s plethora of Unearthed Arcana playtest documents over the years we’ve seen a ton of new character options evolve from initial concepts into their final versions in official published products. Each Unearthed Arcana follows up with a survey for players to weigh in with their thoughts and impressions, which the team uses to guide further development. Some remain largely the same, some change drastically and many don’t pass this playtest stage. At this point quite a few subclasses, feats and other 5E D&D character options fall into the latter category. Curious what didn’t make the cut? Let’s get into it.

Unearthed Arcana written in pencil, not ink

According to the very first Unearthed Arcana document for 5E D&D these documents are a “workshop where D&D R&D shows off a
variety of new and interesting pieces of RPG design for use at your gaming table. You can think of the material presented in this series as similar to the first wave of the fifth edition playtest. These game mechanics are in draft form, usable in your campaign but not fully tempered by playtests and design iterations. They are highly volatile and might be unstable; if you use them, be ready to rule on any issues
that come up. They’re written in pencil, not ink.”

“The material presented in Unearthed Arcana will range from mechanics that we expect one day to publish in a supplement to house rules from our home campaigns that we want to share, from core system options such as mass combat to setting-specific material such as the Eberron update included in this article. Once it’s out there, you can expect us to check in with you to see how it’s working out and what we can do to improve it.” — from Unearthed Arcana: Eberron

Unearthed Arcana: Eberron

This first installment included changelings, shifters and warforged all of which became official 5E D&D material although not exactly in these same forms. Long before Eberron: Rising from the Last War introduced the artificer class to 5E D&D it was presented here as an Arcane Tradition for wizards. This UA also included Action Points, which characters can spend whenever you roll a d20 to make an attack roll, an ability check or a saving throw. There’s also Dragonmarks presented as feats rather than the background options they are now.

Unearthed Arcana: When Armies Clash

The combat rules in 5E D&D aim to keep the focus on the adventuring party with small scale conflicts between the group and monsters rarely exceeding a dozen creatures. But what happens when hundreds of combatants square off on the field of battle? Lots of third party publishers and content creators have shared their takes on such things. This UA builds on the standard combat rules to model large scale battles and keep the focus on the adventuring party who leads the charge. I wonder if any of these concepts will emerge in the upcoming Dragonlance: Warriors of Krynn battle game?

Psionics and the Mystic

For the life of me I can’t wrap my head around why D&D never wants to include psionics as part of the core game. The closest they’ve come is first edition Advanced Dungeons & Dragons where it’s an optional thing and any character has a chance (a very, very slim one) of possessing psionic powers. This UA dropped less than one year after the Player’s Handbook released. I’ve always felt like psionics never really catches on for precisely this reason — it’s always a weird component vastly different than every other character option and always in a non-core supplement. The exception is 4E D&D (the best edition) where the samey-ness of all the classes makes it easier to understand. At any rate this is the first of several takes on psionics as a class for 5E D&D, which still to this day is not a thing.

Unearthed Arcana: Modern Magic

None of these options went beyond this playtest stage. There’s approximately a bajillion third party creators who’ve made 5E hacks for modern settings with all sorts of character options at this point. Most recently some designers of the 3.5 D&D era’s d20 Modern supplement successfully crowdfunded a 5E version. This UA includes the City Domain for clerics, the Ghost in the Machine Otherworldly Patron for warlocks and the Arcane Tradition of Technomancy for wizards. There’s also new equipment — hacking tools — and a whopping 14 modern themed spells for sorcerers, warlocks, wizards and even paladins!

Unearthed Arcana: Ranger

With a little over a year since the official release the design team already noted how feedback on 5E D&D indicated the ranger lags behind other classes in power and player satisfaction. This iconic D&D class got it’s own UA, which aimed to clarify the ranger’s place in the adventuring world and more or less completely redesigns the class. There’s also three new Ranger Archetypes — Guardian, Seeker and Stalker.

Unearthed Arcana: Prestige Classes and Rune Magic

As I recall the concept of prestige classes for 5E D&D went down like a lead balloon. It’s just clunky as heck and I remember at the time thinking that’s basically what subclasses represent. But the design team gave it a shot and came up with this material. Runes and the magic therein are an extremely popular concept among fantasy nerds. In fact just the other day Nerdarchist Ted told me he’s curious to learn more about runic lore from our own real world. The concept of rune magic came up again through another UA. You can find the Runecrafter Arcane Tradition and two rune related feats inside Unearthed Arcana 2022 — Giant Options.

Unearthed Arcana: Light, Dark, Underdark!

I love me some subterranean adventures and characters. This UA dropped shortly after the release of Out of the Abyss, one of my favorite 5E D&D campaigns. The Close Quarters Shooter and Tunnel Fighter fighting styles get things started with some excellent options for underground combat. There’s a Ranger Archetype harkening back to one of my faves from 3.5 D&D (at least in name) — Deep Stalker — and The Undying Light Otherworldly Patron. Not to be confused with The Undying these warlocks’ pact lies with energy that radiates from the Positive Plane and they demonstrate lots of light and fire themed features.

This brings us up to the close of 2015 as far as Unearthed Arcana goes. There’s even more than these, and among the ones highlighted in this post there’s some additional material in a few of them. If I’m honest I’d forgotten how many UAs there have been when I got started and quickly realized this would be one incredibly long post if I included all of them. My main goal was noting the UA options that did not progress further whether their later iterations change dramatically or not.

Later installments of this series will include links to previous posts, and they’re all included in our Blast from the Past category too.

• Excavating Unearthed Arcana that Didn’t Make the Cut, Part 1
• Excavating Unearthed Arcana that Didn’t Make the Cut, Part 2
• Excavating Unearthed Arcana that Didn’t Make the Cut, Part 3
• Excavating Unearthed Arcana that Didn’t Make the Cut, Part 4
• Excavating Unearthed Arcana that Didn’t Make the Cut, Part 5

*Featured image — Jeff Easley painted the Last Spell as the cover image for 1985’s Unearthed Arcana book for Advanced Dungeons & Dragons. [Image courtesy Wizards of the Coast]

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