Prerequisite: Gnome
Your people are clever, with a knack for illusion magic. You have learned a magical trick for fading away when you suffer harm. You gain the following benefits:
Increase your Dexterity or Intelligence score by 1, to a maximum of 20.
Immediately after you take damage, you can use a reaction to magically become invisible until the end of your next turn or until you attack, deal damage, or force someone to make a saving throw. Once you use this ability, you can't do so again until you finish a short or long rest.
Fade Away: Old Gnomes Never Die
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Gnomes are great. They just are. If you disagree, I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. They’re tiny little fey people who love magic, tinkering, and fun, and if you can’t vibe with that, I can’t vibe with you. Fade Away is a nifty little trick fellow gnome lovers can add to their gnome characters to give them a really fun little Invisibility reaction to get you out of danger when you’re in over your head.
Racially, gnomes get the bulk of their power in gnome cunning (advantage on Int, Wis, and Cha saves against magic) and for their subraces. Forest gnomes get a +1 Dex modifier, and all gnomes get a +1 Int modifier, which pushes them typically towards artificers, wizards, rogues, and rangers. Rock gnomes get a constitution buff with a fun little Tinker ability, but it is quite a bit worse than forest’s natural illusionist (free Minor Illusion) and speak with small beasts. Svirfneblin get a +1 Dex score as well, and compete with forest with superior darkvision and advantage on stealth checks in rocky terrain, but more often than not you’ll like see gnomes of the forest variety outside of Eberron (which get a mark of scribing gnome subraces that gets a bunch of nifty stuff).
Fade Away fits cleanly and easily onto the bulk of characters who want Intelligence and Dexterity. Artificers and wizards don’t typically like being hit; having a once per short rest panic button Invisibility is great, especially when it's paired with bumping your odd Intelligence score up to an even one for that +1 modifier bonus. Fighters (especially Eldritch Knights), rangers, and rogues (especially arcane tricksters) all can leverage the invisibility in other ways beyond defense as well, as attacking while invisible treats the creature you’re attacking as if it's blinded, granting you advantage. This can be a repost-like maneuver, used after getting hit by what would be the first in a series of blows that you then dodge a few subsequent ones with and smack back harder next time.
Outside of combat, six seconds of Invisibility can be useful when used in some creative ways. A clean little 1 damage cut is all you need to use Fade Away, making it something you can turn on yourself to slip through a brief opening or get a quick reprieve mid chase and lose your pursuers. It won’t always be that applicable, as, at most, you’re getting two turns of movement with it, but you can still cover a pretty good distance invisibly and might find some windows where it can really shine.
Fade Away is excellent. It supports a variety of play styles, gives your characters a new toy to engage the world with on a few different levels, and comes with an ability score bump to keep your character moving towards that 20 in their main stat. If you’re a gnome, you should seriously consider taking this.
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