Please critique and comment! I want to update this pdf with the best ideas possible.
This product contains a set of rules and information for a new player race; the treant.
Personally I've always loved the concept of living trees, making almost any iteration of them a personal favorite of mine no matter the setting. However, as a player it would be unrealistic and difficult to run around as a 20-foot tall plant. As such, a player who chooses this racial option is a freshly-awoken treant, still small (by tree standards) at a goliath-like 8 feet.
Treants make particularly good barbarians, fighters, and nature-based clerics and paladins owing to their resilience and strength. A treant druid is also an interesting and amusing concept; the beast forms it takes could be topiaries and wood-form animals.
This is definitely a player race that requires some ingenuity and creativity from players and DMs alike.
This work is part of the collections of the Arcane Athenæum. Check out our other works below.
The Artificer class
The Dragon Shaman class
The Ranger (Revised) class
The Sorcerer (Revised) class
The Swordmage class
The Barbarian: Path of the Wild Soul subclass
The Druid: New Druidic subclasses
The Monk: Way of the Mystic Force subclass
The Paladin: Oath of Freedom subclass
The Savage and the Striker: Dual Wielding subclasses
The Sorcerer: Frozen Heart and Phoenix Sorcery subclasses
The Warlock: Great Wyrm subclass
The Wizard: Blue Magic and Sangromancy subclasses
The Sharkfolk player race
Crafting Magic Items: A Guide to Artifice
The Draconomicon for 5e
The Explorer's Guide to the Wilderness
Changelog
Version 3.0 01Jan2019
Overall
- The document has been updated with a new cover image, as with the rest of our products.
- A few minor text fixes have been made throughout the document, mostly fixing spelling errors.
Version 2.0 13Nov2017
Overall
- With the release of Xanathar’s, the PDF has been updated with a treant racial feat. Now you can be the massive powerhouse tree you've always wanted to be, increasing your size category to Large (you and your DM are responsible for figuring out how the hell you get around) and thus increasing your feats of Strength, and making your unarmed blows more powerful as a result. Pole, btw, is the term used to describe a tree that's older than a sapling, but not as old as an adult.
Broadleaf
- Removed the 1d8 + Str unarmed strike damage from the Broadleaf; this was never meant to be included in version 1.2, and is a hold-over while redesigning some of the race's traits. The increased unarmed strike damage made the Broadleaf Treant mechanically superior from the Evergreen, which I wanted to avoid. Just having extra HP per level already put it on equal ground with the Evergreen.
Version 1.2 26Oct2017
Overall
- Remade the PDF in Homebrewery. Looks a bit nicer and infinitely easier to edit now.
Base Race Traits
- Race has undergone a pretty major overhaul to balance it a bit, including moving around certain traits and renaming others. Treants are, unfortunately, a relatively complicated race to design, requiring more than a normal race's features to be properly represented. I do feel that the race is fair and balanced, perhaps a bit stronger but not inherently broken (in the same way that variant humans, for example, are a stronger race option than others).
- Inspired by the Tortle race, changed their AC. Treants now cannot wear armor (as makes sense; they are trees, for crying out loud), but get a natural AC of 14 + Dex OR Con, whatever is higher.
- Gave the treant an unarmed strike of 1d6 + Str, since (let's be honest) you aren't likely to see many treants carrying around swords or axes (though you still have that option).
- Plant Metabolism, renamed to Treeish for a little Tolkien easter egg, streamlines the problem of treants eating and sleeping. More Warforged-like, still requiring a specific kind of activity to actually facilitate a long rest, but the requirements for things like sunlight are made less complicated; more than likely you aren't going to run into the issue of your treant starving to death unless you are running around in the Underdark for two weeks, at which point the lack of sunlight will finally get to you. Water requirements have also been made less restrictive. Fire vulnerability was wrapped up into this trait, and the trait also goes into details that treants are obviously not humanoid.
- Rather than the progressive spells that the treant originally got, now it can just communicate with plants (much like gnomes can communicate with small animals). Easier to deal with.
Broad-Leaf
- Changed the +2 Con to +1 to balance the class better, especially since AC operates more strongly off Con now.
- Removed the advantage on Con saves; the subrace was far ahead of the Evergreen subrace in terms of balance. I think the +1 to Con, AND the +1 HP per level, AND the advantage on Con saves was all just too much wrapped into Con and making the subrace too effective in Con-like attributes. +1 Con already gives it a better Con save than the Evergreen in most cases.
Evergreen
- Changed the +2 Dex to +1 to balance the class better, especially since AC operates more strongly off Dex now.
- Changed their base speed from 35 ft to 40 ft; this was needed to bring it up to par with the Broad-Leaf (even after removing the Broad-Leaf's second trait) and makes the subrace a bit more desireable.
Version 1.1
Overall
- Altered some of the wording in the Plant Metabolism feature, as well as included more realistic rules on suffocation (plants need air, too!)
Version 1.0 08Feb2016
