The Mystical Blade - A 5e Homebrew Class

Ah, the Mystical Blade, my greatest contribution to my 5th Edition D&D group's repertoire of bizarre half-functional homebrew.  I finished it over a year ago and I've spent too much of the past year making jokes about it ad nauseam, so I think it's only logical for it to be my first post here. Plus, it's sort of the namesake of this blog.

The short version of it is that the Mystical Blade is a just barely playable, joke hombrew class for 5e D&D. Rather than posting the entire thing on this page, I'll just put a link to the GMBinder page.

The Mystical Blade Version 3.0

Now for the long version. Let me give you some background.

Two-ish years ago I discovered a website called Botnik. It's a predictive writing program, which basically means you put text documents in it, and it will suggest sentences to write based on that document. The basic version you can use is fairly rudimentary, but it's a lot of fun to mess around with, and it's the kind of thing that's right up my alley. Botnik is probably most famous for the Harry Potter fanfiction written with it: Harry Potter and the Portrait of What Looked Like a Large Pile of Ash. 

So one day, when I was bored in a chemistry class, I decided to download a PDF of the entire 5e Player's Handbook onto my school Chromebook and upload it to Botnik. That was the beginning of it all. I knew right away that I wanted to make a full class with Botnik, though at the time I didn't think I would actually do it. I started out with a simple ability.


Scrounged Bloodline

At 8th level, you can use your action to become an undead. The new form is physically demanding and you can't use any of your turns until you finish a long rest. While you are in this way, you can use your action to make a melee weapon attack using your Charisma modifier. The damage increases by 1d12 + your Charisma modifier when you are wielding a shield.


Okay, so the wording on that is a bit scuffed by 5e standards, and that's kind of a theme of the Mystical Blade. But it permanently turns you into an undead, which somehow lets you attack with your Charisma, and it's more effective when you have a shield. That has imagery. And that was all I needed to get me started.

Within about a week, I had the Mystical Blade's core features nearly done, as well as two subclasses, Sunlight Radiant and Half Ears. Its most iconic features at the time were Mud Pressing, Divine Skin, and Intoxicated Myriad of Creation. 

Mud Pressing was an 18th level ability, that let you gain 5 levels of another class permanently, though the wording was vague about whether or not this was limited by the level cap of 20. Divine Skin, at the time, was a Sunlight Radiant ability. It made it so that when you reached 8th level, you had to make a Constitution save, or "become lost in a misty realm of magic and meditation," though what that actually meant wasn't specified. Intoxicated Myriad of Creation was the final Half Ears ability, and just let you make a new D&D world. I eventually decided that that ability couldn't, and shouldn't be balanced, and made the Half Ears an "optional" subclass, to avoid having to deal with the problem.

It took a full year before the Mystical Blade was finally done, with several new class features, two new subclasses and slightly edited wording. Some core features of the class, I left up to Botnik, which is why the Mystical Blade's only armor proficiencies are leather and "clothing." I partially used Botnik to write the description of the Mystical Blade's spellcasting, and it ended up only giving the class one cantrip, ever. 

Lore and Flavoring

The Mystical Blade's lore, like everything about it, is weird. Because the only sources Botnik had were the PHB, and later on XGtE, I had to make do with an amalgamation of existing lore and flavor text to figure out what a Mystical Blade actually is. So a lot of the description is sort of up to interpretation. But this is what I've come up with. 

The Mystical Blade is sort of like a reverse warlock. Instead of making a pact with some otherworldly being, the Mystical Blade has managed to bind an Otherworldly Patron to serve them. By doing this, the Mystical Blade forces the Otherworldly Patron to maintain their spells. The Mystical Blade also has "unconscious mastery of the blade," which they've achieved through "evil wickedness." Though they're still only proficient in simple weapons. 

So I think Mystical Blades are a sort of group of weird, spellcasting blade masters, who perform evil and esoteric magic rites that no one else really understands and that's where they get their power. Again, it's all up for interpretation.

Mystical Blades also have some kind of connection to the previously mentioned "Misty Realm of Magic and Meditation." All Mystical Blades of a certain level must make saving throws or become lost there, and at 20th level, they can feed their patrons, and force other creatures to become lost in this Misty Realm of Magic and Meditation. I assume this realm is in another Plane of Existence, but it could just as well be a real place, or a metaphor for really deep meditation. 

Power Balance

Obviously the Mystical Blade is not balanced. They choose a subclass at 3rd level, but don't actually get any features from it until 6th. And at higher levels they can steal class levels from people, though at least in the most recent version of the class, this is temporary. Interestingly though, at lower levels the Mystical Blade is actually pretty weak.

It's a full-caster class, but they don't get many damaging spells, and their martial abilities are almost nonexistent. The Spectacular Power fighting style is really strong, but there isn't much it can do at lower levels. The Harmony fighting style gives a lot of versatility, but it can only be used twice per day. Silent Blood lets them move further, but it's very situational, and having advantage on all Stealth checks isn't that good when you're not proficient in Stealth.

It's not until 5th to 8th level that the Mystical Blade starts to become really powerful, with subclass features and the ability to create a weapon that counts as a spell. 

The Story of Clark

I've only been in one game where the DM allowed Mystical Blades to be played. It was a continuation of his first campaign, picking up with the party now at a higher level. All of us but one player wanted to be our old characters, but one player wanted to be his old character, with a twist.

In the original campaign, Clark was a scientologist cleric, working for the gnome-supremacist Gnome Corporation. But getting fired from Gnome Corp had such a toll on Clark's mind that he went completely insane and became a Mystical Blade, though I think he remained a scientologist. 

That campaign was at 8th level, and Clark was the Soul Force subclass. This meant that Clark could use the Line of Ages ability to create something like four 1st level wizards each day. Clark of course, took advantage of this at every opportunity. The DM ruled that Clark's PC could choose the race of these wizards or determine it randomly, and the PC always chose the latter. He also, just for fun, let the PC roll a d20 to determine each of these wizards' ability scores. This meant that one of the wizards, a panda person named Treaty of Heaven, ended up with a Constitution score of 1, and ignoring the errata, could die if he ever gained a level. 







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