Draconic Radiance is Cancer-Prophecy-Power Inducing Light Produced by Dragon Breath

Dragons brought with them a poisonous lume that has irradiated the world. It bleeds from their wounds and burns alongside their breath and flies beneath the shadow of their wings. It is what turned the Hunter's Heaven into the Heavens Bless'd & Burned and how the Goddess of Birth became the Goddess of Armageddon.

It was beautiful; and then, it was sickening.

Take the sum total of all your attribute modifiers. If you have negatives, treat them as 0. Add this number to your total number of hit dice. This is your Radiance Threshold. Should you ever suffer more radiance then what your threshold allows, you roll on the Death by Radiance Table. Roll again for every 2 points beyond that. Despite its name, it is not pure death, but in many ways it might as well be--for you, an ally, or even a dream.

You recieve and lose points of Draconic Radiance through the following methods:

• You gain 1 point for each week you spend outside of the City of the Dragon Wives.
• You gain 1 point after combat with a dragon.
• You gain 5 points when drinking from liquid radiance.
• You gain 1 point per hour when standing directly underneath Aurora Radiance.

• You lose 1 point per day you spend inside the City of the Dragon Wives.
• You lose 1 point per day when you sow at least 10 tree seeds directly into your stomach, up to 10 points.
• You lose 1 point for every 5 hit points you sacrifice during a bloodletting ceremony.
• You lose 5 points when a god kisses you on the forehead, over the heart, or on the groin.

Dragon Wives have a radiance threshold equal to their normal threshold x 2.

Draconic Radiance manifests in the wild as rivers of liquid green-white light that are unbound by gravity. They will flow through dunes and then waterfall in reverse into the heavens and then spread outwards as an irradiated aurora before dipping below the sands again. These rivers move and shift with time; they cannot be mapped, they cannot be tracked, and they have all the deadliness of a flash flood filled with razor blades. Touching a Radiance River instantly increases your radiance to its threshold.

Death by Radiance Table

d10	Radiance Death
1	You begin to hallucinate and dream strange dreams. Roll on the Radiance Visions table.
2	Wounds open across your body, ancient and old. Roll another 1d10. You suffer a number of past injuries equal to the number rolled.
3	A stigma in the shape of an ouroboros bleeds radiance from your forehead. You can now speak with things of draconic ancestry--even if all they speak is madness.
4	Imagine all the goals, dreams, desires, and wants you've ever had. Now imagine them destroyed, one by one, by your allies. This hatred becomes real for you, and you must respond to it.
5	You remember the memories of the First Dragons to hatch from the Bless'd Moon. You know their locations, and they know yours, and they want their memories back.
6	Your body shifts in a strange, draconic way. Roll on the Radiance Mutations table.
7	The radiance stains you in a way unseen. Dragon Wives fly into a rage around you, and have the benefits of facing a dragon when fighting you.
8	Radiance replaces the blood in your body. Anything within 10 feet of you must save vs Magic or gain +1 point of radiance for every minute they remain there.
9	The radiance possesses you utterly. Your character becomes an NPC in the service of Tiamat and flees into the ashpits, seeking her consorts in order to join them.
10	The outline of your body blurs. You can see your flesh, and your bone, and something else too. You feel warm. Then, like morning mist caught in the wind, you scatter to ash.

Radiance Vision Table

d12	Radiance Vision
1	An ape is hunting. The ape has no arms and no face. As it leaps branch to branch, it loses it fur and grows scales. The monkey jumps from the trees and lands on a woman. The two fornicate.
2	There is blackness. From it comes a hand holding a bow. It fires an arrow. A man screams for the loss of his wife. His screams are stopped short by a loud, wet crunch.
3	A wolf is moving a pear through the ash with its snout. It looks up at you. It moves the pear closer. The pear hatches like an egg and from it crawls a fetus made of flame. The wolf howls and the sky turns the color of blood.
4	You are standing ontop of a great plateau. The mountain is made out of opal but is covered in ash. You bend over and remove some of the ash with your hand. Trapped in the opal are thousands of people, silently screaming for help. One mouths your mother's name.
5	As you walk down a of cobblestones lined by palm trees, 17 moons break apart and begin to rain from the sky. Their burning light reveals a dragon swirling about the rubble.
6	You vomit up a pearl into your hands. You look up and staring at you is a woman with a dragon's head. She throws up an identical pearl and replaces the on in your hands with her own.
7	Four burning wraiths of fire surround you. One lies you down, and another begins to fasten your legs and hands together with intestines. The remaining two lift up burning swords and hack off your limbs and replace them with a dragon's own.
8	You are a dragon wife falling through the sky. You can see beyond the mountains and the poisoned sea are castles of glass and gold. Suddenly you give birth to your normal self, who combusts into flames and turns into jade.
9	You are watching a heliographer burn an image into the wall. After hours pass and a 2nd, 3rd, and 4th sun rise up to aid him, the image is done. It is a picture of you fornicating with someone of your own sex under the gaze of a naked woman. The heliographer turns around and has the head of a hyena.
10	You cut your hands off and wrap them around your neck. Then you lie down in an open grave. Scribes write in tablets and then piss inside of the grave. They crush up the tablets and bury you beneath their dust.
11	Ruins are uncovered by wind. The ash blown away from them builds up other ruins, until you stand inside of a demolished city. A man with scales painted over his arms walks down the street and holds a crown out for you to take. The crown is made of bone, the gems of dragon eyes.
12	40 children are playing the Ball Game. One kicks the ball and it unfolds into a dragon with eight legs and no head nor neck. It lands on the ground and another child lays on top of it. That child sprouts wings and begins to cannabalize the other now-singing children.

Sorcery in 5E

I like the idea of each spellcaster having their own unique method of spellcasting. Though this adds complexity to 5E, I think for players looking for some more narrative-defining crunch, the complexity can be worth it. Lots of people want just the standard 5E mechanics, which is 100% understandable, but I'm all about wanting to do things different.

When things get weird.

So, the Sorcerer is my least favorite spellcaster. I like half of its theme (person with strange ways of manipulating spells through will) but what I don't love is how it ends up playing like a wizard that just trades in spell options for small hi jinks.

This is what I want Sorcery mechanics to represent:

• Spontaneous spell effects.
• Strange manipulations of standard spells.
• Highly thematic, exotic, or aesthetic effects added to spells.
• Spell production should feel both wild west yet controlled--like a ronin spellcaster basically.

I also want Sorcerers to represent strange beliefs. They are, to me, a synthesis of culture and spell, and the result is someone born with one step in a sphere almost no one else occupies. Wizards should see sorcerers with envy for being able to do things they never could. They are artistic savants whose pen is their will and whose ink is the spell dancing in their palms.

So, I would give 5E sorcerers a ribbon at level 1.

Half-Strange

As a sorcerer, you have one foot in a number of strange superstitions that only you have directly interacted with. You have advantage on skill checks dealing with superstitious knowledge and gain one of the following quirks below. This quirk represents something from your beliefs manifesting and heavily effecting your mundane life.

Sorcerer Quirks

1. You put strange things on your food, such as kobold bone or oil from a harpy's liver.
2. You constantly reference how details in your present situation have appeared in your dreams.
3. Nearly half of the words you speak are in another tongue, one that you believe will reveal to you mystical secrets.
4. Daily you add some strange detail to your clothing, believing that it benefits your connection with the magical.
5. You paint or tattoo an exposed part of your body to ward off the dangerous effects of magic.
6. The emotions of animals and plants are whispered in your ear and you find it difficult not to mention them.
7. You move very slowly, as perfecting bodily movement will lead you to perfecting your sorcerery.
8. Whenever you visit someplace new, you perform a small ritual over it, to increase the flow of power in the air.
9. You occasionally speak in alien riddles out of hopes that someone solves them, opening up for you a new path.
10. You make odd woodcarvings, sculptures, and other art so that you can visualize the mystical inside of you.
11. Randomly, you will excitedly do some odd movement, apart of a lifetime-long ritual that will lead to the mastery of your powers.
12. You pay respect to something unusual, knowing that this respect will lead to it aiding your growth.

As for spellcasting, let's see. Some notes I think need to apply before I do a full write-up.

• Will use the spell point variant rule in the DMG. Fits better for sorcerers, I think, who gather up their power before unleashing it.
• Will turn sorcery points to spell points and add them to the total spell points held. This way the sorcerer only has to keep track of 1 resource instead of two.
• Add some "half-metamagic feats" to go with standard metamagic feats. You gain one of these every couple of levels, and can change them out as you level up. These are primarily for small spell additions.
• Make it possible to truly spontaneous cast. Roll d100 under sorcerer levels to cast a spell for free. Maybe have some consequences on failure. Or roll a d100 with every spellcast to see if spell is made free and call this your "Sorcery" dice.
• Get some half-metamagic feats when you learn Sorcerery. Normal metamagics as per normal.

Some pros of this are

• Unique casting style.
• Helf-metamagics add spice to the sorcerer's small spell list.
• Allows sorcerer to pump out a more intense variation of high level and low level spells.
• Reduces the resources tracked to 1.

Some cons of this

• Sorcery point math is off, since now it's like 2 spell points to do this thing, or 5 points to do that, etc.
• Makes metamagics on higher level spells confusing, since the sorcery -> spell point math doesn't exist that high up.
• Is a solution for something that isn't really a problem.
• Half-metamagic feats could be too numerous to keep track, adding more complexity than intended.
• Casting spells becomes a math battle of adding things up then changing your mind and adding different numbers up.

Another possible answer to create more unique sorcerers is simply to create sorcerer's their own spell list. Not in the sense of creating a new spell list from existing spells, but legitimately new spells that only sorcerers can learn that replace their spell list. This is something I've been thinking about for a while--creating a special Bard, Cleric, Sorcerer, and Shaman spell list that only these classes draw from. Shamans could learn additional "vanilla" spells through their spirits, clerics through their bonus spells, and bards through their mystical secrets. But Sorcerer spells are the only things the sorcerer can learn.

Going this route, here are some notes I'm thinking about:

• 30 spells. As the Sorcerer can only learn 15 spells, this gives them some descent variation.
• Spells should be strongly themed. Will probably create notes for each spell on how to change its flavor.
• Very interesting effects for upcasting the spell. Maybe effects for using certain metamagics with them too.
• None of these should be named after a person, like the Bigby's Hand spell. Instead they should have highly strange names that sound like a mix of poetry, screamo, and the necronomicon.

Maybe at the end, my updated Sorcerer will just have the ribbon, DMG spell casting, Sorcery points, and its own unique spell list. That sounds rad enough to me.

That leaves archetypes. Might make two archetypes just to play with some unique ideas mechanically, and to experiment with them.

Ideas for Sorcerers Origins now are:

• "Predator Scarred." You gained your powers because your were born to a woman killed by a predator during the birth, or you survived an encounter with a powerful predator in a hunter-becomes-hunted situation. Powers based around beasts, stalking, and high damage savagery. Maybe some kind of curse that turns something into your hunted creature. Might lead into Ranger-Sorcerer overlap.
• "Macabre Beauty." You were born with a strange, death-like beauty to you. Features that deal with easing things into death, enthralling others, curses. Eh, too much like Shadow to me, probably won't do this one.
• "Spell Burned." You've been burned horribly by a spell, both spiritually and physically. Can spread this mystic fire to others via spells, dealing a DoT to them and other debufs. Can hurt self by burning self more, rapidly increase spell power. Burn self for damage equal to 6 + con mod to cast spell at next highest level, up to highest spell slot known.

On Yuan-Ti and Orcs

On Yuan-Ti (including Medusa and Naga):

- Orcs warned humans not to do it, and do it they did.

- After feasting on the flesh of the Coatl out of revenge and anger, the curse was placed. The tribe of humans known as the Yuan-Ti would become twisted and would be hunted as monstrosities until they were all destroyed. So this curse came to pass.

- The curse stripped from the Yuan-Ti their emotions. It left them with nothing but logic, so that they could form no true alliances in the world. It turned many of them into monstrosities called Abominations, or half-twisted Malisons, or the reviled and godlike Anathema.

- But it made something else, too. If one accepts that they have sinned, then a curse is naught but a natural progression of things--a step on a ladder to deification. So the Yuan-Ti ascended even further, and many of them became Feathered.

- A Feathered Yuan-Ti has coatl feathers that bloom from their scalps or their ears or their arms and necks. These feathers give them emotions, and these feathers give them strength. Therefore, there is a Feathered Elite that rules the Yuan-Ti. They look nearly completely human, save for their serpentine eyes and the feathers proper. They call themselves Ouroboros.

- The Ouroboros rule Yuan-Ti society, which is condensed-yet-scattered. It is condensed, as there is one Serpent City, and that Serpent City is a place of intrigue and nightmare, where the Feathered Elite dance a dance of midnight assassinations and constant death with their nightmare-speaking Anathema kin.

- Yuan-Ti society is scattered because Purebloods and Malisons have injected themselves into every culture across the world. There, they weave a Conspiracy with the aid of Drow. This Conspiracy keeps all other creatures away from the serpent city and the truth of Yuan-Ti existence, for they know that if discovered, they would be destroyed utterly.

- There is a Yuan-Ti religion. When they were cursed, they experienced the first nightmares. In those nightmares Yuan-Ti discovered the Night Serpent. They know it will consume all things that do not nightmare, and thus they seek to one day awaken it, to prevent their curse from ever destroying them, for no thing truly wishes to die.

- Yuan-Ti Nightmare Speakers infect the minds of those that get too close to the truth. If you have nightmares, it is because you've met a Yuan-Ti recently and did not know it. The nightmares will terrify you, make you change what you're doing, make you question yourself--and thus the Yuan-Ti remain protected.

- All Yuan-Ti are afraid of losing their curse. Their minds, stripped of emotion, cannot process happiness, and thus they do not know that if they leave the shade of their doom that they will once more be whole. Instead, they full give themselves to their sin, for someone on fire will not be touched by someone safe. Their logic is twisted, but indeed it works.

- Feathered Yuan-TI know emotional fear, not just instinctual fear. They will not give up the powers they hold, nor their feathers, nor their grip on Yuan-Ti culture, for they are afraid of death if they do. Thus, they will often bring in third parties to Serpent City to use as pawns in their games of snake-eat-snake--their Ouroboros Games.

- Some may ask why Yuan-Ti hold sway over snakes. Snakes are wise creatures, whose scales can be read for great knowledge, and who know the ways of medicine and surgery. But if one knew why, they would know why the Yuan-Ti sinned and devoured the Coatl, and they keep such information hidden inside of countless nightmares, all scattered among countless brains.

- The Yuan-Ti know how to spread their curse. Purebloods do so, creating cults and then leading the cults off into the wilderness, from which they never return. These souls are turned into broodguards or Purebloods themselves through methods I will not speak of here.

- Every 52 years, an Anathema, an Abomination, a Malison, and a Pureblood all undergo a ritual of cannabilism. At the end what emerges from this disgusting orgy is a single creature--an Ouroboros, one of the feathered elite.

- Orc oral traditions speak of the Yuan-Ti and their sin. For this reason, Yuan-Ti never approach Orcs, and Orcs are always hunting for the fabled Serpent City, so that they may destroy it and free these humans from their shackles.

- Medusa and Naga are different factions of Yuan-Ti.

On Orcs

Female orc

- Before men, after elves, before dwarves, after stars, Orcs walked the earth proud and feral.

- All cultures that men have, descended from apes as they are, come from Orcs, who once herded those apes and protected their ancestors when the world ended once before.

- Orc oral traditions stretch back throughout the 4 apocalypses that have claimed the world; all the way back to the days of the dinosaurs, which were tamed and rode by Orc Amazons into battle.

- Orcs were targeted by elves, but the Orcs were resistant. They beat and smash and killed, and the elves found no emotions to harvest nor beauty to steal, and thus they left the Orcs alone when better prey manifested in the stars.

- Orcs know that the heights of civillization strips away the primal heart. They saw it happen with many races that have risen and fallen, and warned apes that the same would happen to them, and yet now look at humans, whose primal heart is gone, and who rule a cold world because of it.

- Orc men are goblins; Orc females are linked in this picture below. Hobgoblins and Bugbears are Orcs too, but of a different breeds with different cultures who worship ugly things best unmentioned. Orc women, however, are stronger together then all of these groups combined.

- Orcs know that the Muses that teach and inspire reading and writing have been poisoned by something older, and thus neither write nor read. Everything that must be said is spoken, screamed, or played.

- Orcs wage war because they know that bloodshed keeps the apocalypse from coming again. They wish not to relive the Extinctions they have suffered in the past, and they will kidnap and sacrifice and decapitate as much as needed to protect their children and families.

- Orc War has become a sacred ritual in this instance. There are seasons for war and seasons for hunting. During hunting seasons, Orcs are surprisingly peaceful and worth talking too.

- Orcs share not the psychology of humans. They are older things who know the value of instincts, and do not have the ability to entertain higher, complex philosophical motions. Ideas such as a nihilism and mental illness are foreign to them.

- Orcs are still surprisingly intelligent, but in ways of spatial awareness, understanding how others think and react, in knowing when the weather will come and when a heart will stop. Many Orc Medicine Drinkers can tell you when your death day will come--for this, they are valuable to kings and artist alike.

- There are many Orc cultures. Some prefer the life of roaming hordes, others as simple nomads, and others still set up shop in abandoned dwarf work cities. But make no mistake--they are different from us, and they know it, and they are older too, and they will have no problem killing us if we threaten them with Extinction. They have killed the Gods of Old and will kill them again if need be.