Roguish Archetype: Soulknife 5e

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@CrierKobold

Rogue tends to suffer most in the upper tiers as it runs out of new ways to engage the world. It’s left with just making skill checks with big modifiers; no fancy spells or abilities, no resources to spend for moments to shine. Soulknife addresses this issue by fueling them with some unique roguish abilities that help create the feeling of the psychic assassin blinking around the room and stabbing enemies with their MIND DAGGERS.

3rd Level: Psionic Power and Psychic Blades

Psionic Power is the foundation for the subclass, giving you a pool of twice your proficiency bonus Psychic Energy dice per long rest that can do some neat stuff. Like Battle Master Maneuver Dice, they scale with level and can adjust some elements of two abilities unlocked here and other features down the road.

Psi-Bolstered Knack gives you a retroactive Bardic Inspiration when you’d fail a skill check you’d really like to succeed. Psychic Whispers lets you telepathically communicate with a number of creatures equal to your proficiency bonus for a number of hours equal to whatever you roll on the Psionic Power die, making it last longer than you’ll ever typically need.

What makes these otherwise mediocre powers exceptional is you get a free use of each in addition to your dice pool each long rest. Up until 9th level, this typically looks like five to six Psi-Bolstered Knacks, and just the free Psychic Whispers, sometimes using it a second time should you somehow run out of telepathy.

Initially, this isn’t the most exciting feature in the world, but will definitely set you up to succeed on a lot more skill checks than usual, which is pretty great. If there’s even a ⅙ or ⅛ chance you could turn a failed check into a success, because of how many dice you get, you probably should use your dice to boost your roll.

Psychic Blades is a mainly flavorful attachment to the class, letting you use MIND KNIVES instead of a shortsword and dagger. The thrown range on these is their most notable upside; otherwise, they’re a sidegrade to regular equipment you’ll use for flavor up until their upgrade at 9th level.

9th Level: Soul Blades

Soul Blades lets you spend your growing pool of Psionic Energy dice on two new cool features: Homing Strikes and Psychic Teleportation. Homing Strikes is an incredible way to sink dice to get more hits, as adding a d8 or d10 to hit on a known miss to potentially save your attack. What makes it particularly sweet is the die is only expended if the miss actually changes to a hit; no wasted dice from an enormous pool of resources? Is this GOOD feature design in my dungeons and dragons?

Psychic Teleportation is equally sweet, giving you a potentially massive teleport- or a very short one. The variance in Psychic Teleportation makes it incredibly fun to use, sometimes getting you exactly where you want to go, other times forcing you to improvise and make the best out of a 20-foot jaunt. It’s great in and out of combat, and only takes a bonus action to use. It’s like Misty Step that sometimes can teleport you 130 feet away. Great for infiltration, exploration, and combat. All around, it's a superb feature.

13th Level: Psychic Veil

Psychic Veil is yet another new way to use your Psionic Energy dice, this time, attached to basically the Invisibility spell. Home run. 10/10, no notes. This is all I want as a rogue; to teleport around, turn invisible, and stab things. Now, for the low low cost of 1/10 of your Psionic Energy dice, you can cast Invisibility on yourself. Oh, and that’s in addition to the free use you get per long rest and also can work in tandem with a concentration spell as this isn’t literally Invisibility, just most of the same words as the spell.

17th Level: Rend Mind

Closing out our Psionic Energy dice features is Rend Mind, which can stun hit targets on a failed save. It's like Stunning Strike, but a bit worse. Stunning Strike is a polarizing feature table to table, often leaned on for making monks feel usable in groups facing more complex and challenging encounters. Sticking it on rogue at 17th level alongside the wealth of high utility options the subclass already has is gravy. Three dice is a pretty hefty price for a potential stun, especially given the dice are spent even if the target passes the save, but having a stun on hit has proven to be powerful. 17th level powerful? Probably not.

All Together

Soulknife isn’t my jam thematically. I’d almost certainly look to reflavor the entire thing, but my god is it full of utility. Homing Strikes ups the consistency of your base Sneak Attack with the majority of the rest of the features being known incredible tools rogues love playing with like Misty Step and Invisibility. The flexibility that comes with twice your proficiency bonus dice makes multiclassing out of it incredibly easy at 9th or 13th level, and it pairs superbly with a lot of spell-casting options to make a character that feels impossible to pin down. You can absolutely stick with the option for the full 20 levels and make some use out of Rend Mind as well, as stunning is an amazing condition to have at your disposal. If you want a rogue that can telepathically chat with your team, turn invisible, teleport, and has a knack for succeeding at most of their skill checks, Soulknife is a great option.

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Rogue 5e