How to Play a Great Old One Warlock in Dungeons and Dragons 5e

this week's episode of our show has been sponsored by aurora age of desolation which is coming soon to kickstarter aurora is a new post-apocalyptic campaign setting for fifth edition that implements new subsystems for survival exploration and character creation to survive the age of desolation great heroes are needed to go out and explore the world of aurora and as such aurora introduces new mechanical systems for exploration and survival building on the core mechanics of 5e if you've been looking for a way to broaden the scope of the exploration mechanics and the survival aspects of dnd and making those more of a theme in your campaign then aurora is the perfect setting for you more than that you could also make characters with a unique combination of ancestral traits prepared to take on this dangerous new world so make sure to follow the links below to get all the latest updates on aurora age of desolation and now on to this episode greetings my name is monty martin and i'm kelly mclaughlin and we are the dungeon dudes welcome to our channel where we cover everything d d including advice for players and guides for gm's we upload new videos on tuesdays and thursdays so please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode today we are diving into how to play a great old one warlock in dungeons and dragons 5th edition the great old one warlock gains their powers from entities of eldritch horror you could even use a famous example like cthulhu as your patron they combine elements of psychic energy with mind control powers the great old one warlock is a wonderful character if you want to play a little bit of insane mentalist with a bit of the dash of the flavor of beholders mind flares and the other aberrations that lurk in the spaces between worlds of dungeons and dragons with the versatility of warlocks and all of your spell choices invocations and your feats you can actually dabble in a few different options here with your warlock today we're going to look at the options we might pick to build this warlock looking at avenues to create a blaster a controller and also a bit of a master of deception what's great about this character is thanks to a wide range of concentration spells dependable at will abilities and the fact that your spell slots do come back on a short rest this character has a really great combat strategy that combines blasting and control conjuring up areas of eldritch tentacles portals into the far realm to hurl your foes into it using eldritch blast but also having a backup of some interesting illusions mind control and powers of psychic suggestion that you can use in social situations as well so if you like playing a character that's got a little bit of a cool thing to do in combat and a cool thing to do in social situations this might be the right character for you there's a lot to discuss today so let's get rolling so as we dive into building our character warlocks get to choose their subclass their patron at first level so it's a big decision that we're making right off the bat so it's worth us looking at what we get from our eldritch patron the great old one as we level up first of all like all warlocks we're gonna get an expanded spell list these are spells of first through fifth level that we can choose from our normal spell allotment in addition to the regular spell list unlike say a cleric you don't automatically get the all these spells known you have to pick them and they do count against the spells that you know as you level up there's some real hits on this list like dissonant whispers evarus black tentacles telekinesis and even dominate person we're going to talk a little bit more about these spells in detail when we talk about all the spells we might pick for our warlock but this is a pretty good expanded spell list for for a warlock class now perhaps one of the most interesting and transformative features that the great old one warlock gains and you get this at first level is the awakened mind feature which allows you to send telepathic messages to other creatures within 30 feet of you a few caveats with this there are a few subclasses in the game that have telepathic communication and they don't all work the same in the case of the great old one warlock this is one-way communication so the great old one warlock can send telepathic messages to a person within 30 feet of them but that person cannot respond back this still does allow some very creative play for being able to infiltrate if the warlock is getting their eyes on something and needs to tell the rest of the party they can't or if they need to relay information quietly this is still an excellent way to do so notably you don't need to share a language with the creature to send messages to it they will understand you it should go without saying but you also can't perform the verbal components of spells using telepathy some p players do get a little bit confused about this and wonder if they can cast their spells silently because they have telepathy fortunately that does not not work um i have seen players they'll use this very creatively as part of a deception tactic or an intimidation tactic because telepathy is just communication it still relies on your own ability to be intimidating or deceitful in order to persuade someone of a certain course of action so you may want to make sure that you have proficiency in persuasion deception or intimidation as befits your character concept so that if you do want to send telepathic messages to trick people you have the skills to back that up i do think that there is a lot of fun to be had though if you're role-playing a great old one warlock to use this on lesser-minded creatures if you have some stupid minions who have lower intelligence being able to manipulate them or trick them with this can be really fun yes just bear in mind that having the ability to send telepathic messages to people at will is not the same as being able to cast the suggestion spell at will and it's not going to give you opportunities to control their minds a sixth level you gain in tropic war now your great old one warlock can impose disadvantage on an attack role against them but they need to announce that they're doing this before the dice are rolled at 10th level you gain thought shield which gives you resistance to psychic damage and your mind can no longer be read unless you want it to in addition if someone does psychic damage to you they take psychic damage equal to the amount of psychic damage that you suffered after factoring in your resistance at 14th level you gain create thrall now if you touch an incapacitated creature you can charm it and this charm has no saving throw and lasts until somebody casts remove curse on them or until you use this ability again what's really interesting is that anybody who's asleep is technically incapacitated so if you find a sleeping target you can sneak up and turn them into your thrall for as long as you need them you can also communicate telepathically two ways with your created thrall as long as you're on the same plane of existence this ability is hard to use because the charmed condition once again is not outright mind control you don't control that creature you can't control its actions you get advantage on all your charisma checks against them and they won't attack you but it doesn't mean that you have a minion so there's some creative ways to use this feature but it does require careful planning to to pull it off and it's not just going to give you a puppet you'll want to use dominate person for that with all these features in mind i think we had definitely have a clear orientation for a warlock to be a spellcaster we're not going to be doing anything fancy like a hex blade warlock where we're picking up a sword we're definitely not going to go for the pack of the blade so i think we're going to build a straight up a pretty straight up caster here so for ability scores i think i'm just going to grab 14s in dexterity and constitution put 15 in my charisma and just tank the rest of the board yeah you will be able to get a 10 in probably intelligence and wisdom and then dump your strength but that should give you a pretty solid caster going into this when we look at what race we might pick for our warlock obviously we always love mentioning the variant human if you want to pick up a feet right off the bat but i will say that you can make pretty iconic warlocks out of either a tiefling or asimar i think that both are pretty awesome choices if you're using the rules from natasha's culture and everything let's let you pop around your ability score increases obviously you're probably going to want to boost your charisma and put something into either your conor dexterity again depending on what's more important to you a higher ac or better con saves however one of the things that i think is really worthwhile considering when you're putting together a warlock is just how few spell slots you get as a warlock really can be an issue throughout your entire character's career so this is where i think that cl that races that give you a couple extra spells that you can cast for utility purposes can be really really handy because you're going to want to use your limited warlock spell slots on a really important concentration spell or or a big effect and so sometimes having those small utility things even if it's just in the form of like getting a misty step because you're in a labyrinth or being able to cast darkness because you're a t-flat or just having a little bit of extra features in there can really be a big benefit the next big choice that we're going to make as we're leveling up our warlock is what pact we are going to choose now as we said the great old one kind of steers itself towards being a spellcaster so we're not going to go back to the blade we could go packed of the chain if we want find familiar as sort of an extra added feature although i do think the pact of the tome is probably my number one choice here but i could see arguments for pact of the chain as well i think the pack of the chain is great if you want to invest your invocations on improving it whereas the pack of the tome is a great fire and forget choice because you get the extra cantrips you can grab guidance and another attack can trip so that you've got something else in addition to eldritch blast that gives you a little bit more utility the pack of the tone giving you three extra cantrips is really helpful because warlocks only start with two cantrips and you probably want one of those two cantrips to be eldritch blast so by having the pack of the tome you can grab things like thaumaturgy mage hand minor illusion guidance all that fun stuff that really gives you a lot of utility in a variety of adventuring situations so that's why for me it's my go-to i also really like the invocation that unlocks ritual casting for you too because i think that between having the extra cantrips and the ability to do ritual casting it gives your character a much more well-rounded toolkit for contributing to exploration and investigation type scenarios what we're actually starting to see here is that the great old one warlock is actually a great utility caster not only are we going to see their potential in blasting but i think that even by taking pact of the tome we're we're building this character to be useful in all avenues of play so with all of that in mind that's the core package for our warlock but now we're going to have to pick our feats invocations and spells as we level up our character let's start by looking at feats now if you took the variant human you might be getting a feed off right off the bat although most of us are probably going to be looking at fourth level for our first feat i think that being a caster we might want to look at something like resilient constitution i don't know if we need warcaster because we're going to talk about some of the invocations that can help us out there but i could see warcaster being an option here as well i think with this character if i was able to start with a 17 charisma by having a plus two in my charisma and a 15 to start i would look at one of the half beats that gives plus one charisma plus another feature for the first feat that i take so this is where something like fae touched shadow touched if you're an elf you could take elven accuracy which would be really good here um i think another one that is really really strong because joe used it is actually actor uh because that could have some fun implications here and then once you grab a feat that gives you a plus one charisma to round up to 18 the next ability score increase gets your charisma up to 20. i think this is absolutely a character where um the you take the your first kind of half feet as a perk round up your charisma and then look at your feets later because i think you're going to be pretty self-sufficient otherwise actor does seem like an oddball choice here but if you really want to dive into the master of deception aspect of this warlock it can be a really fun option to tie with some of the invocations we're going to look at i think this is a great character to take telekinetic or telepathic telekinetic is also going to add quite a lot in terms of being able to have that bonus action way of pushing people just a little bit more as we'll see another feat that you could consider is eldritch adapt this is the feat that allows you to get one invocation i personally think that this is a bit of a tough trade for a warlock because you get fewer feats than invocations so trading a feat for one invocation is a little bit of a down trade and oftentimes a feat will offer you more than an invocation a great example of this is comparing the eldritch mind invocation to the warcaster feat you get a lot more benefits at a warcaster than you do out of elder's mind but because we're getting eldritch we're going to take elder's mind it's worth we'll get it onto that shortly sometimes you just have to gauge where you're going to get your bargains so think about that carefully but um it might be worth taking more at higher levels when you've got all the other feats that you want and you just want to pick up another invocation i don't know if it would be one of the first feats that i would grab right away as we move on to invocations we're kind of looking at the blaster aspect of this character as we pick our first few invocations so i think our great one-two punch is combining agonizing blast and repelling blast once we get into our spell choices we're gonna see how this is gonna work in our favor but adding extra damage to your aldrich blast and being able to knock creatures around with it is going to be very important for this build another important invocation that i would take as soon as possible is eldritch mind this gives you advantage on your concentration savings throws to maintain concentration on your spells and as a warlock your go-to strategy is going to be put putting out a concentration spell in in combat and it's really costly for you if that goes down because for most of your character's career you only have two spell slots between short rests so you really want to make sure that concentration stays up i would grab elder's mind as soon as possible provided that you haven't taken warcaster as a feat already i think it's best to take eldridge mind so that you can take other feats because really what you want is that advantage on con saves that you get from eldridge's mind the only other invocation that i think is really interesting for this build and one that people don't take too often is lance of lethargy and this co allows you to once per turn when you hit a creature with eldritch blast to reduce their speed by 10 feet as we'll see we're going to be using eldritch blast to knock enemies into the area of spells that we cast many of these spells create areas of difficult terrain or slow creatures down and lance of lethargy means that it's harder for creatures to get out once we knock them in there and even if they can get out they won't be able to get out as far so we'll be able to knock them back in again it's a very subtle invocation but it has some really big implications for how this character plays in combat if we look at other invocations that we might pick another great option to pair with the actor feat is mask of many faces which allows you to cast disguise self at will we've seen joe who plays a great old one warlock in our live play campaign use these two to great effect during social encounters sneaking into places he puts on a really good show of combining actor and mask of many faces to turn into other people and sneak into areas so if you want to double down on the master of disguise or the master of deception that's a really cool invocation to look at joe is a very creative player and in our games he made taking the gift of the depth in vacation completely justified and very powerful i think beyond the core four indications that we mentioned you could your options are very open here um you could take sculptor of flesh to get access to polymorph you could take eldritch spear if you're fighting long-range combats i really like book of ancient secrets to get access to ritual casting as well and if you want a little bit better ac than what you can get by wearing light armor you may want to consider armor of shadows i think that um the invocation there's no best option along the way when it comes to the invocations and it is worthwhile being a little bit nimble with what you take and considering your campaign as you go along once you've kind of got the four essential invocations for our bill here as we get into spells that we're going to pick for our great old one warlock let's first look at the expanded spell list that they have access to we're not going to take all of the spells on here but i think the most important ones are going to be dissonant whispers evarts black tentacles and telekinesis the reason for this dissonant whispers is just a great spell and does force creatures to move so that is also going to help us now we have dissonant whispers and our aldrich blasts that are moving targets if we look at ivard's black tentacles this is a great area of effect spell that tangles people up keeps them there but also deals damage what's important to note about this spell and some of the other ones we're going to mention is that targets take damage when they enter the area and when they start their turn there that means that if you knock a target into evarts black tentacles they roll to make their save take the damage and at the start of their next turn take more damage you can get two times the damage out of one round if you use this properly and it really adds up a lot more than hex if you ever are a 7th level warlock if you cast hex on a single target that target will take an extra 2d6 damage if you hit it with two of your elders blasts but if you are able to put down your evards black tentacles in a strategic location and push a target outside it into it the target has to make a saving throw if they fail that save they're gonna end up taking being restrained in your tentacles and they're gonna end up taking an extra 6d6 damage just in that round alone now if they make their save when they get pushed into the tentacles at the start of their turn they have to make a save again which means that they could still end up taking 3d6 damage and being restrained and stuck there so in order for them to not get stuck in the black tentacles they have to succeed two saving throws assuming you push them in with eldritch blast because you're firing two beams you have to push the target 20 feet so even if you have to push them a long distance or through difficult terrain you've got that movement to get them in there and once you do get them in there the black tentacles require an action to escape and then are themselves difficult ground and with lance of lethargy you've reduced their speed by 10 feet if a creature is pushed into your tentacles and does escape it's going to cost them enough movement to walk out that next turn you'll be able to push them back in again and if you need that extra little nudge telekinesis also lets you move targets around so you're starting to see here we are really good at controlling the battlefield while dealing damage using that control tactic so that's our spell list but let's take a look at some of the spells that we're going to take as we're leveling up our character i still think that hex is mildly important but really only for the first few levels this is actually one of the few warlocks where i could see not taking hex but i still want to mention it because it's a go-to i think that hex has its uses for being able to debuff ability checks in a pinch so there are teamwork situations where being able to say hey you have disadvantage on your intelligence ability checks to investigate this illusion or on your strength checks to break out of this grapple those can all be useful but as far as a damage dealing spell the ability to push creatures into damaging areas is gonna always do more damage than what you can get from just extra beams on eldritch blast and so you could be totally justified retraining out hex as soon as you get to level five and can take hunger radar now if we are again thinking about our master of deception side of this i think that taking suggestion is a great choice again controlling not only the battlefield but social situations is something that this character's really good at they're the master of reading minds manipulating people and manipulating the battlefield it's kind of a through line that reaches into all aspects and i think suggestion is very on point this is where um if you did take those feats like telepathic or telekinetic you really get to get the most out of those feats too because we can use telekinetic as our bonus action because we're not using our bonus action for hex to help finesse pushing enemies around on the battlefield or we can use telepathic alongside our other abilities to really augment those in social situations so that's where depending on where your feet selection went you could end up with something pretty effective now we did mention taking hunger of hadar but that's not actually going to be our best option here yeah hunger of hadar is actually at its apex right when you get it at fifth level that's its strongest point it's really strong until you get to the fourth level spells where we're gonna take what's probably gonna be the most important spell for the whole concept of this build which is sickening radiance like evard's black tentacles sickening radiance deals damage when a target enters the area and when it starts its turn there so the same things that we said about evard's black tentacles apply to sickening radiance evarts black tentacles is still really useful because it restrains the targets but sickening radiance causes exhaustion has a much bigger area of effect and with all of your abilities to move people around you can blast them pretty far into it and then slow them down so they can't get back out again and if you are doing that there's a chance that they are going to acquire two levels of exhaustion and when they get back out you can blast them in the in there again for another two levels of exhaustion it can be pretty debilitating oh yeah because exhaustion like the exhaustion goes away when the spell ends but it doesn't go away if you get them to exhaustion level six and they die and if there's if you get them to the point where they're exhausted enough that their speed is reduced to zero that's kind of the end already well you have to get a creature to exhaustion level five to reduce their speed to zero a creature's speed is halved at exhaustion level two this means that combined with lance of lethargy if you get two levels of exhaustion on a creature they will not be able to get out of their of your sickening radiance unless they are super fast right like because even if you think about a creature that has a speed of 40 feet well their speed is halved and reduced by 10 feet and depending on how your dm decides to do the math of that um they're still well well within the range that only two blasts of elvish blast are going to knock them right back into the area not to mention if you if they were just on the outskirts when you cast your sickening radiance and you knock them right into the middle of that spell they can barely even get out well exactly because because elders blast gives two instances of of a ten foot push and then if you've got telekinetic you've got another five foot so you can move somebody 25 feet and if they're if they're 30 foot speed you reduce the speed to 20 feet so you're already at the point where even where they would need to dash to get out and not be able to get knocked back in and if they're doing that they're not attacking they're not doing anything practical so that results in a in a battlefield control situation that can be pretty oppressive another interesting point about taking ivar's black tentacles hunger of hadar and sickening radiance is that they all involve various types of saving throws it's very rare for a monster to have good saves in both dexterity and constitution usually it's going to be one or the other so getting to know your enemies and knowing which spell is going to work best against them could make the difference in the battle i also think that ivar's black tentacles is much smaller than sickening radiance so it's good for those encounters when you're in a tight-knit space or when you need the ability to restrain the targets and you don't want them moving around and of course you definitely want something for when monsters are immune to exhaustion although sickening radiance does a lot more damage and it's radiant damage too i think that as we look at a final spell to talk about although it does also require concentration i feel like there's a really iconic play here and that is summon aberration yes now summon aberration is specific for the great old one warlock because i imagine that the great old one warlock is worshiping an aberration of some sort yes so you're summoning a manifestation or a servant of of cthulhu basically yeah and i love that one of the options that you can summon is the beholder kin yes and i just imagine maybe there's like a great god of beholders that is the person that has bestowed the power into you and you're summoning one of their kin to help you in battle or if you're a great great old one it's like as a thoth it could be one of the pipers right yes like the tentacled pipers and like they're shooting the beams out of the the the trumpet um summon aberration is great especially with the beholder because the eye rays on the summoned aberration do 1d8 plus 3 plus the level of the spell damage and it fires two rays so casting summon aberration to some of the beholder kin is like doubling the number of beams your eldritch blast fires if you're casting it when the spell first becomes available so it's always going to be more damage than hex as we continue to level up i think the world's your oyster in terms of what awesome spells you want to pick we have our plays down here we know that we're either going to be dropping evarts black tentacles sickening radiance or if neither of those are suiting our needs we can summon an aberration to just get extra blasting it these are the three core plays of this character when we're in combat when we're not in combat and we're moving into social situations we have the actor feat mask of many faces and suggestion to really control those situations of course these options might work for any warlock but we're specifically talking about them because there's something about the great old one warlock with their telepathy they're creating thralls their entropic wards they feel like they belong in a place where they are warping people's minds controlling the situation through movement and mind control and to bring that flavor in feels really at home and i think that this is a well-rounded well-balanced warlock that excels in multiple areas of play it's really important with a warlock because of their limited spell slots and their reliance on elders blast to have a really good one-two punch that is your go-to in combat that you can rely on this means that you know that as long as you've got one spell slot available to you you have a really amazing strong and powerful thing to do in combat freeing you up to use your other spell slot for a utility so you can take things like mirror image detect thoughts suggestion teleportation spells like dimension door bring in that little bit of extra utility so that you can still contribute in a variety of other ways once you kind of solve that puzzle you really find that the warlock isn't necessarily as limited as it seems like on paper maybe you can feel like a bit of a one-trick pony but i feel like the whispers of the old ones have given you a couple extra tricks to pull up your sleeve in this case so this has been a look at playing a great old one warlock in dungeons and dragons 5th edition if you've played this character tell us about some of the choices you've made in the comments below the videos that we create on our channel are made possible thanks to the incredible generosity of our patreon supporters if you enjoy the work that we do here on youtube please consider joining our patreon community so you can get on our patreon only discord and chat with us about your character builds you can find all the information in the description below and if you want to see a great old one warlock in play you should check out our live play in the worlds of drakenheim you can find all the previous episodes right up over here and we've got plenty more guides to character building in dmv 5e right up over here please subscribe to our channel so that you never miss an episode thanks so much for watching we'll see you next time in the dungeon

Channel: Dungeon Dudes

Views: 55,044

Keywords: dungeons, dragons, tabletop, gaming, roleplaying, games, accessories, rules, rule, gameplay, play, game, rpg, d20, player, character, D&D, 5e, DM, PC, tips, advice, guide, guides, review, dice, books, book

Id: NajWlGB2GzI

Length: 29min 28sec (1768 seconds)

Published: Tue May 03 2022