Play Your Next 5E D&D Game as a Rage Singer

Over at Nerdarchy the YouTube channel Nerdarchists Dave and Ted bang their heads together and come up with a barbarian and wizard combo for fifth edition Dungeons & Dragons with the Rage Singer character build. Metal health will drive you mad, after all. We want it louder, more power for a 5E D&D character who’s gonna rock it till it strikes the hour. Let’s get into it.

Behind the CBG — Rage Singer

Every CBG we create considers the journey as much as the final outcome. We aim to present a guide suitable for any level of 5E D&D play whether you’re pursuing an epic campaign from start to finish, starting beyond 1st level or choosing a character for a one shot. Then we take those concepts and develop an NPC or creature version of the character build for DMs to incorporate into their games. All of this gets packaged up and laid out in a PDF you can find over at Dungeon Master’s Guild. We’ve got dozens of pay what you want products at DMG, many of them best sellers so if you want to check those out start with the Rage Singer here.

All about the character story

Each CBG starts with a character concept sticking to a particular schtick, from the Mind Breaker’s psyche crushing smites to the Rage Singer’s dedication to combining strange combat techniques into their own style. Sometimes puns and pop culture references instigate the creation of a CBG too. At every step of the way we considered options for expanding upon the variety of wellness enhancing skills, abilities and features.

For us it’s important to consider who these characters are as individuals and why they follow these particular paths. One special thing to note with this CBG is while we always aim to make the journey to 20th level as practical as possible — none of these characters “come online” after an awkward slog through many levels — the Rage Singer accomplishes what we set out to do by 3rd level. This marks the earliest any of our currently 57 CBGs fulfills the goals. From this point forward the Rage Singer accumulates an eclectic collection of hard rocking combat techniques.

The Rage Singer illustrates how important it is for us to find a character’s narrative thread. Rather than aim solely to present flawless mechanical superiority when we create a CBG we incorporate often unusual elements to shape our ideas into a character we’d enjoy roleplaying and exploring. In this case we leaned into the robotic aspect of warforged. (Yes, we know they’re not robots but the trope is firmly established out there.) The Rage Singer takes a logical and analytical approach to their development. One half of their gimmick — the rage part — comes across more as an academic discipline than a wellspring of primal fury. This foundational choice informed everything else from their background to choice of Primal Path and decision to delve into psionic combat techniques down the road.

Sage of Swords NPC for 5E D&D

Full disclosure — the NPCs and creatures we make in CBGs are some of my favorite bits of 5E D&D content to create. We step back and look at the character build to find the standout features that feel like signature abilities. The juice! From there we consider what sort of person or people would possess or gain these abilities and build a stat block around them. More often than not the section of a CBG For Dungeon Masters presents a generic creature.

If I’m honest this CBG confounded me a bit as far as the NPC version was concerned. With so many unusual features along with spellcasting basically amounting to a magically buffed melee combatant I felt like the stat block would be a confusing hot mess. But then Dave and Ted mention the idea of collecting the brains of famous warriors and I knew right away this is the hook. (No small number of folks in the video comments love this concept too.) There’s at least three iterations of brains in jars in 5E D&D already and our Sage of Swords brings another one into the mix — the Battle Brain.

I couldn’t help but imagine this is a neutral evil NPC individual rather than the more generic creature versions we typically include. In order to further their research and development of the ultimate combat techniques they selfishly acquire the brains of the world’s greatest warriors, which they incorporate into their training facility lair and draw on for knowledge and assistance. While putting this NPC together I really fell in love with the idea of a cut-and-dry warforged warrior tapping into residual psionic energy of these Battle Brains. This also solved another design challenge — making viable melee combatants at higher challenge ratings. Along with mashing together the Path of Wild Magic’s weird features into the Sage of Swords’ Armblade attack this is probably my No. 1 favorite CBG creature to date.

Macabre Collector. Once the Sage of Swords gleaned all they could from manuscripts, tomes and manuals of battle they took their odd collection of combat skills into the world to test their hypothesis. The results were stunning and the former cloistered scholar developed a new hypothesis — that the ultimate knowledge of sword supremacy resides in the minds of the world’s greatest warriors. So they began to collect the minds of defeated warriors, which continue to share their secrets…

“Psionic Protection. When the Sage of Swords takes damage, it can use its reaction to expend reduce the damage taken by 1d8 for each Battle Brain within 30 feet.”

If your next 5E D&D game needs a character who approaches combat with a bizarre yet surprisingly effective perspective — whether you’re the DM or a player — check out the Rage Singer Character Build Guide here.

*Featured image — A psiforged is a type of warforged with psionic powers and a crystal-embedded integument from back in the days of 3.5 D&D. You can find them along with a trove of magical lore for spellcasters and artificers inside the pages of Magic of Eberron. [Image courtesy Wizards of the Coast]

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