Prerequisite: Tiefling
You learn to call on hellfire to serve your commands. You gain the following benefits:
Increase your Intelligence or Charisma score by 1, to a maximum of 20.
When you roll fire damage for a spell you cast, you can reroll any roll of 1 on the fire damage dice, but you must use the new roll, even if it is another 1.
Whenever you cast a spell that deals fire damage, you can cause flames to wreathe you until the end of your next turn. The flames don’t harm you or your possessions, and they shed bright light out to 30 feet and dim light for an additional 30 feet. While the flames are present, any creature within 5 feet of you that hits you with a melee attack takes 1d4 fire damage.
Flames of Phlegethos: Too Hot to Handle
Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold
Tieflings have shot up in popularity in 5; they’re a little bit of edge, a whole lot of whimsy, and an endless well of creative options to play with. They’re just human enough with the perfect amount of “other”; if you want to take the devil look up to 11 and really embody the hellish instigator, Flames of Phlegethos is the feat you need. Even if the whole devil thing isn’t your deal, if you just want to be a pyromancer, this feat makes Elemental Adept even more of a joke than it already is.
Out the gate, a Charisma bump makes it so as long as you’re turning an odd charisma score into an even one, it justifies existence on your sheet. If you’re the tiefling sorcerer, warlock, or bard, that’s good enough. On top of that, when compared to all the other feats offering Cha bumps, you’re basically just competing with Fey Touched and Shadow Touched for particularly powerful feats. If you’re happy with your options, and want to empower them instead while gaining a new defensive damage tool, I think this absolutely can earn its place.
Beyond the Cha bump, you’re getting an upgrade to fire damaging spells that lets you reroll all the 1s rolled as part of a spell that deals fire damage, and a 1d4 Fire Shield like effect rewarding melee arsonists. It’d be nice if the fire damage upgrade applied to any fire damage you dealt, as opposed to just fire damage from spells, but that’s a nitpick; upgrading your Fireballs and Burning Hands with these rerolls can have a huge impact on how damaging your spells feel. Now, when you roll 8d6 for a Fireball, 1s aren’t immediately a bummer to see: they’re an opportunity. The actual damage improvement scales with quantity of dice and likes lower sized dice and while numerically you’re getting only a bonus four-ish average damage compared to a regular Fireball, manually removing instances of 1 feels so good. Plus, it changes your minimum damage substantially; you go from having around a 90% chance to get at least a 22 to a 90% to get at least a 27, a 5 damage bump up on the lower end.
The Fire Shield effect isn’t wild or crazy, but does add up on paladins and actually encourages use of some underpowered options like Searing Smite. If you’re being attacked by large quantities of tiny creatures, 1d4 fire damage is going to kill a decent chunk of said tiny assailants and can come out very affordably. Reaction and bonus action fire damaging spells paired with builds aimed at taking damage, such as pact of the fiend warlocks or draconic sorcerers, can leverage this to get just a bit more extra damage each round and get the feeling of rebuking enemies for their transgressions against you. It's neat; not particularly powerful, especially in the upper tiers as the damage doesn’t scale at all, but neat.
I like Flames of Phlegethos, especially at level 4 on hybrid caster/martial builds using fire consistently. If you’re leveraging spells like Create Bonfire, Burning Hands, Searing Smite, Hellish Rebuke, and Fire Bolt often, this feat will really shine. I love reducing my chances of getting 1s in my Firebolt, and this makes that event happen less. The flaming shield you get from frequently using fire damage is a great little perk that will feel like free bonus damage, and really encourages martial caster hybrid builds. All in all, while not game warping in power, I really dig Flames of Phlegethos on tieflings.
Thank you for visiting!
If you’d like to support this ongoing project, you can do so by buying my books, getting some sweet C&C merch, or joining my Patreon.
The text on this page is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.
‘d20 System’ and the ‘d20 System’ logo are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
and are used according to the terms of the d20 System License version 6.0.
A copy of this License can be found at www.wizards.com/d20.
