You can cast Bane once using a warlock spell slot. You can't do so again until you finish a long rest.
Thief of Five Fates: The Bane Drain
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Conceptually I adore the character who “steals” luck. The vagabond spellcaster out there siphoning fortune from others with occult symbols and stolen relics deeply appeals to me. Thief of Five Fates evokes that imagery in name only, as what the invocation functionally does is nearly useless and isn’t ever worth taking.
Warlocks are tied to the pact magic mechanic, functionally reducing the total spells they’re casting at the average table with spell slots compared to most other casters around them. This leaves the bulk of their power tied up in their invocations; these invocations range from empowering common actions they want to take, like the attack action with Thirsting Blade or Agonizing Blast with the Eldritch Blast cantrip, to giving them new tools to enable powerful exploration and social options like Mask of Many Faces and Book of Ancient Secrets. Thief of Five Fates does neither of these things. Functionally, it teaches you the Bane spell, but then only lets you cast it once a long rest for some reason. That isn’t good enough for an invocation. It doesn’t give you more things to do, it lets an already hyper competitive resource have even more competition, but the competition it's adding is Bane.
Nobody is bending over backwards to get access to Bane. Bane is a mediocre cleric 1st level spell you try out once then swap it out for the consistency of Bless. Bane takes your concentration and is a 1st level spell; that immediately competes with Hex, and more importantly, competes with every new spell you’ll learn that requires your concentration that doesn’t take invocations to learn.
Thief of Five Fates could be an interesting direction for warlocks to go if it made Bane a repeatable, accessible option for them. If it gave them a free cast and let them spend spell slots on it I’d be interested; if it was at will, I’d rate it about as highly as Fiendish Vigor, as it’d be a somewhat interesting support Warlock option they could mess around with. Still not game warping by any stretch, but an interesting low tier option. As is, no character wants this. You can’t afford to waste your invocations on something that does so little. Thief of Five Fates doesn’t belong on any character sheet.
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.