Lunar Sorcery Sorcerer 5e

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@Crier Kobold

The mystical properties of lunar magic have a rich history in cultures all across the globe; Lunar Sorcery ties your character to this mysticism in a captivating and thematically rich fashion. Dragonlance: Shadow of the Dragon Queen added a lot of setting-specific content, but Lunar Sorcery breaks that mold as an option the game was majorly lacking.

Mechanically, Lunar Sorcery gives you tools to embody pulling your essence from the moon to fuel magical rituals. It ties into its phases and appearance, building on top of these ideas to give you a shifting and dynamic play pattern from session to session. Not only do the mechanics showcase beautifully the aesthetic, it provides some needed expanded spells to cover major pain points many sorcerers feel.

1st Level: Lunar Embodiment and Moon Fire

Lunar Embodiment sets you up with the basic gimmick this subclass uses: moon phases. You learn three bonus spells at 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 9th level, each of the three associated to either Full Moon, New Moon, or Crescent Moon.
- Full Moon gets Shield, Lesser Restoration, Dispel Magic, Death Ward, and Telepathic Bond.
- New Moon teaches you Ray of Sickness, Blindness/Deafness, Vampiric Touch, Confusion, and Hold Monster.
- Finally, Crescent provides Color Spray, Alter Self, Phantom Steed, Hallucinatory Terrain, and Mislead.
You learn all of these as you progress whenever you get spells of the associated levels. They’re not all winners, but with how many you get, they don’t need to be. At least one each level I consider at least reasonable, with some being excellent additions like Shield, Dispel Magic, and Hold Monster.
On top of this, with every long rest you pick a phase and can cast its 1st level spell once for free. Free bonus spell slots on top of more known spells? Sign me up. But wait, there’s more!
Moon Fire teaches you Sacred Flame restyled to be lunar light. Additionally, it empowers it in a similar form to Death Domain’s Reaper feature by letting it hit two things within 5 feet of each other at once.
Doubling anything tends to be powerful. In the early tiers, this is a house of a feature. It kind of scales twice as well as normal as the game progresses as well, as the total damage it deals per round goes up for each creature hit. When you factor in metamagic letting you quicken this, you’re setting yourself up to regularly have Moon Fire contribute to your turns for the entirety of the game. It’s a concise, yet stellar 1st level ability.

6th Level: Lunar Boons and Waxing and Waning

Currently, your chosen phase just determines what free 1st-level spell you want. Lunar Boons gives you a major new reason to consider it, as it gives you sorcery point discounts on specific schools of magic depending on phase: Abjuration and Divination for Full, Evocation and Necromancy for New, and Divination and Transmutation for Crescent.
Reducing the cost of metamagic to potentially zero is ludicrous. You get to empower spells constantly with this kind of feature, especially seeing as it scales up in uses with the game. It will often feel like 6 free sorcery points that you can only spend on specific schools of magic, encouraging you to plan ahead and make a build focused around a specific phase.
You can swap between them to try new toys out as you get them you want to Quicken or Twin. At minimum, with New Moon, you can now fire off doubled Sacred Flames from Moon Fire for a single sorcery point. Twinning cantrips like Fire Bolt for 0 points alongside this means you can have turns where you’re not even spending spell slots, yet feeling like you’re blasting away like crazy.
Waxing and Waning adds a bonus action swap mechanic to your sheet you want to get use out of, as it also empowers your Lunar Embodiment to give you one free 1st level cast per phase. This means for 1 sorcery point and a bonus action you can functionally get access to a 1st level spell cast, offering you plenty of extra resources to play around with at the cost of needing to switch up your Lunar Boons alongside it. If you’re in New Moon, but want your free cast of Shield, you can switch cheaply, but doing so turns off your discount for quicked Sacred Flame.
This is by far the best design we’ve seen from 5th Edition for stance swapping. I adore it. It has layers of complexity that reward you for planning out your turns in the future and swapping around phases to use a wide variety of abilities instead of sticking to the same three actions over and over.
A single bonus spell slot isn’t that compelling, especially given two of the options are Ray of Sickness and Color Spray, but don’t worry, it gets even better.

14th Level: Lunar Empowerment

Lunar Empowerment provides you with specific abilities you only have access to while in a specific phase. Full provides you a bonus action light effect that provides advantage on Investigation and Perception checks while in any light you create. New gives you passive advantage on Stealth checks, and makes all attacks made against you while in total darkness be at disadvatnage regardless of darkvision. Crescent is the least interesting of the bunch, as it just provides resistance to necrotic and radiant damage.
Thanks to Waxing and Waning, you can swap between these as needed, further encouraging you to get your free casts out while they’re up.
You’re not typically going to want these effects in the same scenarios, either. When you are going for stealth, New Moon is obviously where you want to be while Full Moon isn’t going to be helpful. When investigating a murder scene, though, swapping to Full Moon can provide the entire team a meaningful buff. Suddenly finding yourself against the lich that killed the victim, then, asks you to swap over to Crescent to get resistance against their Circle of Death.
As you’re swapping around, what you want to spend sorcery points on changes, and I adore that. You actually care about having a wide variety of different schools of spells ready to use between the different phases you want to switch between to get their various effects for different circumstances.
My only gripe with this option as a whole is the power level of these three abilities is a bit on the low side. I would have loved to see non-skill based empowerment to out-of-combat exploration like a hover speed or temporary group invisibility. It’s still a solid feature thanks to the rest of the subclass abilities.

18th Level: Lunar Phenomenon

Appropriate closing out the subclass is Lunar Phenomenon. Once per phase you get a special ability you can invoke when you swap into the phase with Waxing and Waning, or just as a bonus action on your turn. You regain these uses when yo finish a long rest, or unless you spend 5 points to use a phase you already used again.
Full blinds creatures of your choice within 30 feet of you temporarily while healing another creature for 3d8. New deals 3d10 to select creatures within 30 feet and reduces their speed to zero while turning you invisible for a turn. Crescent teleports you to a space within 60 feet with a buddy, and you gain resistance to all damage until the start of your next turn.
Any of these as a bonus action is excellent. They each come packed with two spells’ worth of text for a bonus action you can us alongside your upper-tier spell slots. You’re highly encouraged to use all three between rests, and I can absolutely see moments where 5 points for a critical extra teleport and damage resistance will come up, or a need to get another ally off of zero while blinding enemies actively trying to kill you.
The efficiency of this feature is off the charts. This is the kind of top end abilities sorceries crave; powerful bonus action effects they can use alongside their game ending high level spells.

All Together

I wouldn’t just say Lunar Sorcery is the best of the sorcerous origins; I’d say it's one of the best subclasses in the game. It creates a distinct, interesting play pattern with tons of expansions of the base design. It encourages you to explore different kinds of spells with meaningful rewards for doing so. It continues to build on its core concept in increasingly complex ways.

This currently is my favorite option in the game from a design perspective. If you’re a sorcerer and want a rich pool of spells, a stellar presentation of fantasy matching in game mechanics, ample opportunity to try out new things, and a compelling reason to stay in one class, I can’t recommend Lunar Sorcery enough.

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