Cleric Subclasses: Creating Homebrew
Oh, the cleric. Responsible for keeping a party alive, providing boosts, buffs, and aid to their comrades, and bringing the divine force of the gods against their enemies. Our next look at homebrew subclasses brings us over to the Cleric!
The cleric wears a lot of hats and can fulfill a wide variety of roles in a party. They can tank, they have a full spellcasting progression, they can heal and restore dead creatures to life, they are a bit of a jack of all trades. There isn’t really anything they can’t do but doesn’t mean that they are going to be great at all of these roles. Where they really shine is playing a crucial support role for the party that can augment that support to best match the situation ahead of them. Unfortunately, this amount of flexibility and reliability comes at the cost that their class isn’t seen as very exciting. In fact, their core class abilities are pretty lackluster to other classes, but it’s solid and makes for a very strong character that can help any party!
Cleric Class
The cleric class is a full spellcaster focused on healing, aiding allies, being a tank, and even doing a bit of damage. A cleric has a very flexible starting spell list, though at higher levels it is quite limited and is often used to just heighten spells to a stronger level. They are quite versatile and reliable, but rather boring when it comes to their core class abilities since they are so limited.
The most important thing a cleric gets is their subclass which provides more spells, more damage, new abilities, and provides the flavor to their divine calling.
Subclasses
A cleric subclass provides features at levels: 1st, 2nd, 6th, 8th, and 17th. The subclass provides a lot of the flavor and excitement for a cleric and also keeps a cleric’s power strong enough to contend at higher levels.
I will be using the subclasses featured in the Player’s Handbook and Xanathar’s Guide to Everything as examples as we begin building this subclass.
Beginning, let’s go over the basics of a cleric subclass.
1st Level
The 1st level of a cleric does a lot of heavy lifting on the class and is an exciting reason to consider multiclassing into the cleric class. You get domain spells, which provide spells that you always have prepared for 1st-, 2nd-, 3rd-, 4th-, and 5th-level spells that, depending on the subclass, greatly expands on the cleric spell list. These spells can make and break someone's decision to join the domain and provides a rough idea as to what the subclass is about before you even look at class features. If you see a lot of elemental spells, you know the subclass is going to be natured geared. If you see a lot of healing spells, it's going to be focused on keeping your party alive. If you see a lot of damage spells, well - you get the point.
After the domain spells you also get access to the Bonus Proficiencies feature, and every subclass provides a different set of proficiencies that your cleric is going to get. This often revolves around skills, but it might include new weapons, heavy armor, languages, and more. If you aren’t sure what your domain should have for their bonus proficiency, you can just provide heavy armor for it and that’ll be in line with a few other subclasses.
Our third and final bit of 1st level is the unique abilities of each subclass that provide a ton of flavor and mechanical abilities. The life domain gets better at healing. The war domain can make an extra attack on their turn. The tempest domain can start fighting back when they are struck and send the power of lightning and thunder down on their enemies. This ability is important as it helps provide the power of the subclass at early levels.
There are a few subclasses, like knowledge or nature, who don’t offer more abilities for combat but rather give even more proficiencies on skills or things that are important to the class. That’s great for a subclass you want to push towards being better in the exploration or social pillar of the game, though the cleric might feel underpowered compared to others in their group.
2nd Level
Every cleric at 2nd level gets a new way of using their Channel Divinity, the feature that powers their turn undead ability. These features help invoke the feeling and flavor of the subclass while providing a mechanical benefit that is designed around being used as a once per encounter ability, though as you get more powerful in being a cleric, you can use these abilities more often. These abilities vary widely from being used as much as you can to being highly specific or sometimes a dead feature, like the Knowledge domain who gets a set of tools for 10 minutes. Weeee.
6th Level
This level helps provide more combat options to clerics and can help them augment the battlefield in their party's favor. The tempest domain can blast back their enemies, the life domain can heal themselves whenever they heal their allies, the order domain can start casting certain spells as a bonus action, freeing their action up for healing or attacking. These abilities are all useful in combat and help a cleric become more specialized in their subclass.
If you aren’t sure what to give a cleric, you can also give the cleric another Channel Divinity option, though this is only done three times for Knowledge, Trickery, and War. These abilities are typically stronger than the other subclasses give out at 6th level and so are forced to be more limited in nature. The benefit of going Channel Divinity is that you can make something slightly stronger than a normal 6th level feature.
8th Level
This feature is the way to keep a martial-focused cleric strong enough to stay in the fight. It provides a 1d8 damage boost to clerics, and at higher levels a 2d8 damage boost. This is a necessary feature for keeping the cleric strong enough to hang out with the fighter in the front lines - but can be augmented in very specific ways.
If you decide that it doesn’t make sense for your cleric to be better at hitting creatures with a stick, you can instead give the cleric a boost to their cantrips by letting them add their Wisdom modifier to cantrip damage. This is a bit rarer than simply increasing damage on weapon attacks but is a good option for the clerics who just want to hide in the back and not get hit in the face by the hungry hydra.
17th Level
Our final feature for the cleric! This is a feature that is focused on combat and upping the cleric’s power and ability. There are a few deviators like life clerics can heal more or knowledge clerics can get more… knowledge… it is focused on making a cleric more powerful for these final levels of the game. When designing this feature, think about how your cleric interacts with enemies and how they can increase that thing they are good at. War domains get resistance to normal weapon damage, order domain get to deal more damage so long as an ally is helping them, and even the trickery domain gets a way to augment their channel divinity and help confuse their enemies on the battlefield.
Many of the subclasses offer abilities that can be used at will, though a few others find ways of augmenting their channel divinity abilities to do something a bit more powerful. Since channel divinity options can be limiting, it's recommended that you create a feature not tied to it - but certain ideas may work best when it comes to augmenting your channel divinity like nature domain having greater control over some shrubbery.
Technology Domain
We have now gotten to the part where I make a subclass and go over it all based on what we learned about the cleric domain! This cleric is partially inspired by the nature cleric and mimics a few of its abilities as I felt like it was a nice reflection of nature vs technology.
1st Level
The technology domain clerics get their normal domain spells, 10 more spells that they always have prepared. These spells really help shape the idea behind the subclass and, at a quick glance, tell you a lot about the flavor. For technology we have the following spells:
1st level / grease, unseen servant
3rd level / knock, repair damage*
5th level / leomund's tiny hut, tiny servant
7th level / conjure minor elementals, fabricate
9th level / animate objects, uplift*
These spells invoke the idea of creation and different elements of science… I also have a few new spells in there as 5e is a bit limited when it comes to spells that help exemplify what a technology domain cleric is all about. I think my favorite spells off the list are grease and, despite how much I dislike the spell, animate objects. Those two spells really paint a great idea of a tinkerer creating constructs to come help them in the fight.
Of course, that isn’t the only thing clerics get at 1st level as this level is loaded down with great stuff! Up next, our cleric gets a bonus proficiency in Tinker’s Tools and Firearms. Tinker’s Tools helps provide some tools for them to use on their machines while firearms are definitely the technological-minded creature’s weapon of choice when it comes to preaching about their gods.
The final bit of mechanics for our cleric is their combat-focused ability since the core cleric class lacks it. Their ability allows them to strengthen their firearms and shove creatures they really dislike further away from them. This can be great at the start of a fight to shove away a creature who is focused on melee, forcing them to spend their action to dash over to their best friends and saving their party from getting hurt.
2nd Level
Their channel divinity is similar to the nature domain in that they have certain creatures that they have a strong affinity for, though I feel like parties are more likely to face off against constructs and elementals than beasts and plants. While this channel divinity is situational, it can help turn the tides of a hard fight or simply by the key to getting the party out of a tough jam or past a clockwork guardian.
6th Level
Bonus damage! Who doesn’t like just adding numbers together and deal even more damage? This feature augments their 1st level ability to knock their enemies back by dealing additional damage and helps the cleric perform even better on the battlefield. Not much to say about it beyond it’ll help this cleric protect their allies from damage by killing their enemies faster.
8th Level
A boring, but required, feature on the cleric subclass progression. Our cleric now gets to deal an additional 1d8 points of damage. The damage type is flavored to whatever damage type best matches the subclass. For this subclass, it will be piercing since the firearms in 5e deal piercing damage. For those playing with the Modern Magic UA, you could change that to ballistics damage for better flavor.
17th Level
The same way that our channel divinity is a reflection of the nature domain channel divinity so is our 17th level that makes it so all charmed elementals and constructs are forced to follow our commands. This makes the cleric a powerful controller of technology and shows how much their gods have blessed them. While it isn’t the most exciting ability, and because it is tied to channel divinity, quite situational - it is slightly more powerful than the other subclasses and makes a cleric’s channel divinity awesome when they get a chance to pull it out.
Spells
While you don’t need to make new spells for a cleric, or any subclass, I decided to make a few to better help the cleric feel special and more in line with my vision of them. The first, Repair Damage, gives the cleric the ability to cast a super-powerful mending spell as well as give constructs a way to recover hit points since cure wounds and other healing spells are unable to. This is important for our next spell…
Uplifted Construct is the answer to all those who looked at the awakened bush and thought… I really want a clockwork soldier. Pair this with the Repair Damage spell, and you have a great combination to keep your 1,000 gp investment alive for the entire month before it inevitably leaves you because the DM is tired of making up a stupid voice for it and forces you to spend another 1,000 gp to get another friend.
Wrapping Up
This subclass, while beautiful in my mind, is only missing playtesting and running it through its paces. That’s one of the secrets of homebrew is testing it over and over, fixing any weak spots, or pulling back anything too powerful. Eventually, this’ll get refined as it is played more and more, and I’ll update any links on this page as the subclass gets played.
This is the basics for creating a cleric subclass and I hope this helps pull back the curtain and you can make your own for your world. If you have a class you’d like to see a similar approach too, please let me know down in the comments!
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