From the Pale 5e Wiki

What do you seek?

Universal Character Changes

Class Changes

Frequently Asked Questions

I'm new to this homebrew, and there's a lot of stuff here. How should I learn all of this?

Just like learning the base game of DnD for the first time, you don’t need to learn everything at once. Start with reading the changes to the core system, then move on to the character you want to play and see what changes have been made to your class/subclass/race/or feats. Finally, depending on whether you are a caster or martial who will gain maneuvers, check the relevant spell or maneuver pages for changes and new options.

For an even quicker onboarding: at least familiarize yourself with the rest rules and your character’s changes before playing.

Why is [insert class here] missing features? How do I read this?

This is not intended to be a wiki page for all of DnD 5e’s content. This knowledge base is specifically for the changes made in the From the Pale 5e expansion. As a result, if you don’t see some feature or another on a subclass (even a heavily modified one), it just means that this feature was left unchanged.

As an example, Chronurgy Wizard has changes made to almost all of its features, so one might miss the fact that Temporal Awareness was not changed. The feature still exists, and functions exactly as was printed.

I recommend having your book, D&D Beyond, or preferred 3rd party wiki on hand when looking through changed content while building a character in From the Pale 5e, so you don’t miss features that were not touched by the project.

Why does this expansion exist? Why would I want to use these rules as a dungeon master?

This document is a labor of love for a system that I very much enjoy. 5th edition Dungeons and Dragons has a charm to its ability to fall in between a more crunchy system such as Pathfinder 2, and a more narratively focused system such as Call of Cthulu. I enjoy this, and others clearly do too given the popularity of this edition.

Speaking of the edition’s popularity, D&D 5e exploded in popularity in part due to the media surrounding it; live play shows and podcasts in particular contributed a lot to this. D&D media is often many players’ first introduction to the game, and that has caused a shift in how many DMs run their tables and structure their narratives.

The 2014 DMG was built around the assumption that the players will usually be challenged on an adventuring day by a high volume of combat encounters, and days which are not “adventuring days” (defined by the number of combats, not whether the party is actually adventuring or not) were seemingly ignored or lumped into the rules for spending downtime. This has not proven to be a great fit with the slower and more narratively focused pace that emerged from the storytelling on the podcasts that grew D&D 5e into the behemoth it is.

I wanted to resolve this disconnect and address some of my other pain points in the system as both a player and DM in this homebrew.

This document seeks to do two things:

1. Aid DMs by clarifying rules, retuning unbalanced player-side content (reducing the burden on DMs to always understand what might break their encounters, and how to work around it), and giving optional systems they can utilize in their games to improve both encounter and adventure design.

2. Give players new content to play with through rebalanced character options; this rebalanced content aims to not only buff weaker options in the game, but also to give characters tools to interact with the narrative more regularly (e.g. buffs to the martial classes to increase their ability to contribute more to an adventuring party outside of combat).

If those things sound useful to you and your game, I highly encourage you to continue reading this document. Whether you choose to run your game using all of the rules from this document, or find just a few things valuable to port over to your game (such as the rest system, or a specific subclass rebalance), I hope there is something useful to you here. I have yet to implement it, but I will eventually be adding a tagging system to help show when a rule or reworked content is reliant on other parts of this homebrew for balance, to help DMs take individual rules more confidently from this wiki.

All content in this document has been tested extensively over the last several years in both one shot and live campaign environments.

So what's coming next for this wiki?

Right now, we just have the content from my old google docs wiki dumped out into this knowledge base. I’ll be spending the next few months playtesting using this wiki and seeing how I can improve its presentation and utility. After that, my plan is to create a tagging system to mark what content is reliant on the balance changes from other parts of the system, so other DMs can take parts of this homebrew in piecemeal if they don’t vibe with my full set of changes. Then I’ll be improving the search system for the wiki, and finally I’ll be making some visual changes to make the website prettier to look at.

Outside of the wiki improvements, I also will be trying to make regular updates on my blog with homebrew content for From the Pale 5e (one shots, adventure modules, and monster statblocks which I’ve tested with the system), design journals for detailing the journey that different parts of the rework took and my thought process behind them.

If you have other requests for changes, please feel free to message me on WordPress!

Entries From Beyond The Pale

List of Spell Changes

Cantrip spell changes

1st level spell changes

2nd level spell changes

3rd level spell changes

4th level spell changes

5th level spell changes

7th level spell changes

9th level spell changes

New Spells

New cantrip spells

New 1st level spells

New 2nd level spells

New 3rd level spells

New 4th level spells

List of Maneuver Changes

Changed Skill Maneuvers

Changed Level 5 Maneuvers

Changed Level 8 Maneuvers

Changed Maneuvers (No Level Requirement)

New Maneuvers

Skill Maneuvers

Level 3 Skill Maneuvers

Level 5 Skill Maneuvers

Level 3 Maneuvers

Level 5 Maneuvers

Level 8 Maneuvers

Level 11 Maneuvers

List of Feat Changes

New Feats

List of Species Changes

Frequently Asked Questions

Featured Articles

System Changes

Player-facing Changes

DM-facing changes

Combat

Rest Rules

Skill Checks

Exploration and Downtime

Universal Character Changes

Class Changes

Spell changes

List of Spell Changes

Cantrip spell changes

1st level spell changes

2nd level spell changes

3rd level spell changes

4th level spell changes

5th level spell changes

7th level spell changes

9th level spell changes

New Spells

New cantrip spells

New 1st level spells

New 2nd level spells

New 3rd level spells

New 4th level spells

Maneuver Changes

List of Maneuver Changes

Changed Skill Maneuvers

Changed Level 5 Maneuvers

Changed Level 8 Maneuvers

Changed Maneuvers (No Level Requirement)

New Maneuvers

Skill Maneuvers

Level 3 Skill Maneuvers

Level 5 Skill Maneuvers

Level 3 Maneuvers

Level 5 Maneuvers

Level 8 Maneuvers

Level 11 Maneuvers

Feat Changes

List of Feat Changes

New Feats

Species Changes

List of Species Changes

Legendary Resistance Changes

Damage Resistance and Vulnerability Changes

Changelog

Frequently Asked Questions

Featured Articles