Sea Servant Prestige Class (WIP)

I love the idea of prestige classes and I'm really upset they aren't in vanilla 5e. Thankfully, Wizards released an example to work off of, so I wanted to try building one myself. This is specifically built for a character I'm currently playing, "adapted" from the Waveservant prestige class of 3.5. Still a work in progress in every way.

Prestige Class: Sea Servant

The Sea Servant

Levels	Features
1st	Tempest Domain Spells, Water Breathing
2nd	Ocean Strider
3rd	Rage of the Bitch Queen
4th	Primal Senses
5th	Release the Kraken

Prerequisites

In order to advance as a SeaServant, you must meet the following prerequisites (in addition to

the multiclassing prerequisites for your existing class):

• Strength 15. Umberlee does not tolerate weak SeaServants, for their strength is required to stand against the strong tides.

• Spells: Ability to cast 2nd-level divine spells.

• Patron: Umberlee.

• Character level 7th. Umberlee only chooses the worthy as her servants, and you must be a 7th-level character before you can gain levels in the SeaServant prestige class.

• Complete a special task. You must have made peaceful contact with a water elemental or an evil aquatic creature; the creature must be at least CR6 and the character must have communicated with it using a language or magic. has. You might need to seek out additional creatures and make peaceful contact with them in order to reach 5th level in this prestige class.

Class Features

As a Sea Servant, you gain the following class features.

Hit Points

Hit Dice: 1d10 per sea servant level

Hit Points per Level: 1d10 (or 6) + your Constitution modifier per sea servant level

Proficiencies

Weapons: Tridents

Tools: Navigator's tools, Water Vehicles

Saving Throws: None

Skills: Nature, Survival

Equipment

The sea servant prestige class does not grant any special equipment.

Class Features

Tempest Domain Spells: At 1st Level a sea servant can prepare any spell from the Tempest Cleric Domain as if it were on his divine spell list. The spell uses a spell slot of a level equal to its level in the Tempest Domain list. For instance, a ranger/sea servant could prepare Fog Cloud as a 1st level ranger spell.

Water Adept: A sea servant can breathe water as easily as air, and gains a swim speed of 30 feet. If the sea servant already has a swim speed, the swim speed instead increases by 10 feet. Any Dex saves made while swimming are made with advantage.

Ocean Strider: At 2nd level, sea servants move and attack normally while underwater as if they were under the effects of a freedom of movement spell. They may also cast spells unhindered when underwater. Restrictions not directly related to the water (such as a web spell cast into the water) are not thwarted by this ability. A sea servant can also see underwater as if she had darkvision.

Rage of the Bitch Queen: At 3rd level a sea servant can call upon the inhuman malice of Umberlee herself. On Your Turn, you can enter a rage as a Bonus Action. While raging, you gain the following benefits if you aren't wearing heavy armor:

• You have advantage on Strength Checks and Strength saving throws.
• When you make a melee weapon Attack using Strength, you gain a +2 bonus to the damage roll.
• You have Resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage.
• If you are able to cast Spells, you can't cast them or concentrate on them while raging unless yo are underwater.

Your rage lasts for 1 minute. It ends early if you are knocked Unconscious or if Your Turn ends and you haven't attacked a hostile creature since your last turn or taken damage since then. You can also end your rage on Your Turn as a Bonus Action.

You can only rage once per day.

Primal Senses: At 4th level, a sea servant becomes so attuned to the ocean she becomes like that of a shark. She effectively has the tremorsense ability in regard to creatures within or touching the body of water she is in to a distance of 60 feet. Otherwise, she can faintly detect creatures that are in the water within 180 feet and can detect blood in the water at ranges of up to one mile. For example, if she were in an underground lake, she would know the exact location of an invisible rogue within swimming within 60 feet through the lake toward her, would know of but not be able to locate the invisible fighter who is swimming 100 feet away, and could smell the blood a cleric is shedding beneath the water 500 feet away.

Release the Kraken: At 5th level, you become a ferocious force of nature. Using your action, you undergo a transformation. For 1 hour, you gain the following benefits:

• Your swim speed increases to 60 feet.
•  Your lower half transforms into kraken tentacles. These tentacles are natural weapons with reach which you can use to make a melee weapon attack that deals 1d6 + Strength modifier bludgeoning damage. If the target is a creature, the player may immediately make an attempt to grapple the target. While a creature is grappled in this way it is restrained. The sea servant has eight tentacles, each of which can grapple one target of size medium or smaller.

Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you finish a long rest.

Learning the Importance of Managing Encounters

Encounters are arguably the cheese of any campaign if the PC's are the meat and the DM is the Taco Shell. I won't go into the mechanics of building encounters because there are plenty of YouTube guides for it and the DMG goes over everthing you need to know. What I'm going to go over here is the importance of WHEN to add encounters, how many you should add, and the content of such encounters. This is for those beginner DM's who don't really get how encounters influence the feeling of a game or how it really impacts the characters or a campaigns pacing.

First of all if you're running a pre-made campaign and it has some sort of list of encounters to have during travel or whatnot I urge you to carefully look over the list and consider your situation. Say, for instance, I have the list of day and night encounters for the Curse of Strahd module for D&D 5e. Almost all of the monsters are either weak as shit for the scaling of the campaign or they're just... boring and inconsequential. At this point I've completely abandoned even thinking of using it because it adds nothing to the campaign itself and just slows eeeeeverything down.

So, instead of that, I've began building my own encounters using different monsters straight from the Monster Manual that I deem thematically accurate to the campaign setting. That, and I've been spacing out the encounters way more and making sure they just don't feel shoehorned in for the sake of having combat. In a different perspective, not all of the encounters have been combat in the first place, that's why they're called "encounters" and not just "combat". At one point I had the party stopped at a crossroads and straight up encountered a Bride of Strahd who had come to give them a message instead of using Strahd himself. Long story short, it can add a lot to a campaign if you try to be more strategic in the amount of combat encounters you have vs. roleplaying encounters.

The short of it is this: don't force your encounters if you don't need to, and don't make them all random combats. Space them out, plan them accordingly, and add flavor where necessary. Make them actual parts of your world and story rather than just filler because RPG.

That's all I really have to say. It's not much I know, but it's not really a subject that really needs a lot of explanation. Till next time.