Circle of Spores Druid 5e

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@Crier Kobold

Mushrooms are all the rage. Cute fungus hats, witches with their mushroom baskets and potions made from weird fungal roots, myconid characters reveling in all their mushroom glory- what’s not to love?
Circle of Spores is for druids who want to embody the more morbid side of mycelium. It was introduced for the Golgari Swarm in Guildmaster’s Guide to Ravnica, and has been a mainstay ever since as a great, unique direction for building druids that want to get in the thick of things and rot away their enemies!

2nd Level: Circle Spells, Halo of Spores, and Symbiotic Entity

Circle Spells show up here to give the circle some of the thematically fitting effects they’d been lacking from the druid spell list while ensuring you’ve got some of the druid options accessible all the time. Chill Touch is a fine bonus cantrip, and Blindness/Deafness and Gentle Repose are niche effects that make for reasonable bonus spells. Animate Dead, though, offers you a complete build direction should you choose to pursue it: the druid necromancer. The remaining spells aren’t all winners, but getting them for free alongside two other meaningful features is gravy.

Halo of Spores gives you a free damaging reaction. Incredible. Anytime you’re engaged, you a save for free damage. The damage doesn’t scale particularly well and will result in a lot of Con saves, but for the first five levels, getting a free d4 damage on something each round is meaningful, especially on a class that lacks meaningful reactions.

Symbiotic Entity is the core of Circle of Spores; instead of transforming into a beast with Wild Shape or summoning a familiar with Wild Companion, you can get temporary hit points, double the dice your Halo of Spores deals, and deal a bonus d6 damage on hit with your weapon attacks.

This feature lends itself to multi-classing; with a fixed ten-minute duration and only a two-level dip required, getting Extra Attack first, then a pair of levels in druid for some bonus damage on hit, a free reaction you can use every round, and all the other benefits a two-level dip in druid offers.

Without a way to get extra attack yourself, this doesn’t scale particularly well, with the majority of your bonus damage coming from your reaction. Still, this as a tool in the early game especially will feel great.

6th Level: Fungal Infestation

Fungal Infestation takes your Animate Dead and doubles up on the fantasy, giving you an animated beast or humanoid that dies near you. You can control it for an hour, getting free attacks every round. This on top of a battery of skeleton archers and a Summon Beast or Summon Fey results in an army of creatures around you. On its own, it's a free creature three to five times per long rest is incredible, especially given that there isn’t a CR gate- only a size gate- on what can be reanimated.

10th Level: Spreading Spores

Spreading Spores offers you an exchange: you can’t use Halo of Spores, and instead can create a bonus action 10 ft. cube of spores that deals your Halo of Spores damage each round instead. It also requires you be using your Symbiotic Entity, which further limits the use cases it offers. If you’re not in melee range, this is a way to weaponize your Halo of Spores, but seeing as you’ve probably wanted to be using it prior to this point, most builds are going to reflect you wanting to be in melee range. Changing it up this point does give you some more flexibility in situations where you might not want to engage a specific threat, and let you instead damage it remotely with Spreading Spores, but I think a lot of the time this is going to feel like a side-grade to your base feature anyway. Not a huge fan of Spreading Spores.

14th Level: Fungal Body

Fungal Body is boring and simple. It's less than two lines of text. Becoming immune to critical hits as a melee-ranged druid is meaningful, as is immunity to some common conditions. I don’t love boring defensive features, and can’t get excited to stay in the class to get this, but seeing how packed full the spell list and 2nd and 6th-level features are, I’m not particularly disappointed.

All Together

Circle of Spores gives druids something new to do, in a way that still feels druidic. It takes undead and meshes them into the natural feeling druids evoke, with the flavor being corpses animated with fungal life instead of evil undeath. Halo of Spores and Symbiotic Entity make the option excellent for a multi-class fighter, monk, paladin, or some other martial class. On its own, its lack of scaling into extra attacks makes the melee range feel worse and worse as the game goes on, eventually transforming into a more traditional full-caster druid who leans on their upper-tier spells to do all the heavy lifting. Overall, I think Spores is a deeply interesting option with some fun mechanics. If the mushroom druid is something that appeals to you, this option can deliver.

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