Prerequisite: 5th level
As a reaction when you take damage, you can entomb yourself in ice, which melts away at the end of your next turn. You gain 10 temporary hit points per warlock level, which take as much of the triggering damage as possible. Immediately after you take the damage, you gain vulnerability to fire damage, your speed is reduced to 0, and you are incapacitated. These effects, including any remaining temporary hit points, all end when the ice melts.
Once you use this invocation, you can't use it again until you finish a short or long rest.
Tomb of Levistus: You’re as Cold as Ice
Review by Sam West, Twitter: @CrierKobold
Facing down certain death, backed into a corner, just needing to buy a few more seconds, the gnome clutch’s her book of shadows, whispering an infernal incantation as the dragon’s minions close in. Erupting out around her is a massive frozen tomb, a brilliant blue barricade, encasing her as the kobolds begin their assault. They chipped and swung at it, but by the time they broke through the ice, they were too late. The kobolds turned to face down the rest of her party, armed to the teeth and ready to deliver justice.
Tomb of Levistus is such a nifty little tool. It's a gigantic mass of hit points, all at once, when you’d need it, but at a fairly steep cost: your next turn. 10 temporary hit points per warlock level can easily result in hundreds of temporary hit points, functionally guaranteeing you’ll prevent whatever incoming damage is happening right now. A lot of upper tier monsters have single use or infrequent use high damage abilities; this can reactively counteract one of those, and then also mitigate some swings from their minions.
Losing an entire turn, though, can be backbreaking. It makes this major damage sponge a tool you have to consider carefully, timing it exactly when it’ll eat the most damage possible. You need to have confidence in your fellow players to achieve whatever objective is needed to justify using it. If you’re preventing a few attacks from a storm giant, but nobody changes the circumstances between its next turn and now, Tomb of Levisistus is stalling for nothing. They need to redirect its anger, hit it with a save or die, kill it, or otherwise change the nature of the encounter to get you in a position where death isn’t as certain.
Tomb of Levistus is hard to use well, and when overused will actively detract from your team's ability to win by wasting your turns inside a devil’s popsicle. At its best, though, Tomb of Levistus is the kind of feature that can best some of the most dangerous damaging abilities in the game in a way nearly no other feature can. It's not for everyone, but it can absolutely find a home on sheets playing in particularly lethal settings.
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