Prerequisite: 5th level
You can breathe underwater, and you gain a swimming speed equal to your walking speed.
You can also cast Water Breathing without expending a spell slot. You regain the ability to do so when you finish a long rest.
Gift of the Depths: Throw it Back
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Seafaring D&D is often a veteran event. It opens up at 5th level when Water Breathing comes online, and because Water Breathing is a ritual spell, you just need basically any ritual caster to pick it up for the whole party to have a “free” way to play in underwater environments. This isn’t so much a typical spell as a ritual feature that unlocks some new places to explore, like getting an upgrade in a video game that gives you a double jump or unlocks a new zone.
Gift of the Depths doesn’t cost a spell known, though: it costs you an invocation.
Invocations are worth a LOT more than a known spell, or a spell stuck in a spellbook. Now it does do slightly more than give you Water Breathing; having a swim speed makes underwater combat for you feel basically like regular combat while your allies without swim speed will have disadvantage on melee weapon attacks. That’s the only advantage you’re getting, though. You can use melee weapons normally. Ranged weapons that aren’t aquatic (crossbows, nets, and thrown weapons) still automatically miss. Water Breathing makes casting verbal component spells work normally, making your caster friends as effective as you at spellcasting.
An invocation isn’t worth that. There are a myriad of more important options to take as a martial warlock character than this. Seafaring games don’t tend to be exclusively underwater anyway; chances are if your DM wants to put you all in an adventure to go pillage Atlantis, they’ll give you a way to do that if you don’t already have one. Chances even if that’s not the case, you’ll have a druid, sorcerer, or wizard you can just spend a spell prepared/known/in their spell book instead of you needing to sink an invocation into getting this.
If you’re the only way the party has to get Water Breathing this can do the job, but so can some gold and Book of Ancient Secrets if you’re a Pact of the Tome warlock. That gives you the bulk of what you want here in addition to the other ritual options you’ve accumulated while adventuring. This just benefits you if you’re a melee warlock a decent amount in underwater fights and nothing else. Outside of the ocean, this becomes worthless. The moment you aren’t submerged (which even in seafaring games is the majority of the time) this has no text. Warlocks NEED their invocations to be flexible and usable wherever they go. This is something you take as a last resort when no other way is open to a needed way to navigate the depths of the sea, and something you swap out the moment you leave the water. If you can help it, don’t take Gift of the Depths.
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.
