Bard College of Spirits 5e
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Listen: I’m a sucker for necromancers. Something about the evil undead monstrosities and macabre, edgy evils of undead speaks to me as a player. It's my personal inner edge-lord fantasy preference, and College of Spirits delivers on that fantasy in a spectacular fashion.
See Also: Best Feats for Spirits Bard
3rd Level: Guiding Whispers, Spiritual Focus, and Tales from Beyond
Guiding Whispers starts the option out strong with an empowered version of my highest-rated Cleric cantrip: Guidance. 60 ft. cast range expands its utility to even more out-of-combat situations. Guidance is great; Guidance at 60 feet is gravy. If your group already has a cleric or druid doing the Guidance thing this can feel a bit excessive, but don’t fret, as you still get two additional features!
Spiritual Focus enters as a flavorful modification to your spellcasting focus but improves up to being a universal damage and healing upgrade at 6th level, which is just great. Any character will benefit from this kind of feature. It isn’t the most massive boost in the world but immediately satisfies the fantasy by giving you written mechanical access to flavorfully rich casting objects like a tarokka deck or skull on top of eventually empowering spells any character wants to cast.
Tales from Beyond is a robust feature that changes how you’re going to want to be using your Bardic Inspiration for the foreseeable future in an incredible way. You roll the inspiration die on a Spirits table which organically grows as your inspiration die size increases, getting a stored effect you can then use later as needed. The possible effects range in utility and power, but all offer some boon that is largely more powerful than spending Inspiration dice normally.
Standouts include Tale of the Runaway, a 30-foot teleport for a creature and up to your Charisma modifier creatures around it of its choice, and Tale of the Beguiler, a save or die that deals twice your die damage and incapacitates the target on a failed save. Tale of the Phantom offers a creature Invisibility, Dragon produces a four dice-sized breath weapon, and Mind-Bender can stun creatures.
Where many random table features largely fail with uninteresting effects, the Spirit Tales table offers a robust list of excellent abilities applicable in a wide variety of environments. Some, like Tale of the Clever Animal, definitely may encourage you to reroll, but most will regularly be usable after rolling and provide utility you’ll have a blast with.
6th Level: Spirit Session
Spirit Session mechanically is a seance Magical Secret you can swap around limited in level by the number of creatures you include in the seance and school to Divination and Necromancy.
What makes this feature particularly exciting is how it functions similarly to prepared casters' spell preparation mechanics. On a long rest, you can get access to any necromancy or divination spell you need until your next long rest. Need to bring an ally back to life? Prepare Raise Dead! Want undead servants for your next session? Animate Dead or Summon Undead can do the job.
Standouts include Animate Dead, Create Undead, Danse Macabre, Detect Magic, Hunter's Mark, Raise Dead, Revivify, and Summon Undead.
14th Level: Mystical Connection
Mystical Connection closes out the college with an upgrade to your Spirit Tales table, letting you roll twice and ignore one result, or in the case of rolling the same result, pick. This radically reduces the instances of getting effects you don’t want in combat to nearly any rolls, as most will give you some combat options you want. As its own 14th-level feature it is a bit underwhelming, as it’s only a quality-of-life upgrade for a feature you’ve been playing with for 11 levels, but it still is a meaningful empowerment.
All Together
It may be my love of undead bias coming through, but College of Spirits to me stands out among the bard classes as a superb choice. Its got a varied play pattern with a large suite of expanded features to play with. Out the gate, you’re getting three additional features, one of which expands at 6th level when you also get a new mechanic that offers you a huge well of possibilities to foundationally change your role in the party and expand your opportunities near endlessly. Tales from Beyond is an inspired design that does variance well, and actually has consistently potent effects you’re excited to get at their cost.
The College of Spirits gets a ringing endorsement from me; flexible, powerful, and capable of delivering on a bunch of different necromantic fantasies in style.
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.
