Subclass Development 101: Adapting Skitter Facts

Hello again. It’s been a little while since the last time we’ve had a normal sized archetype to talk about. Today, I’m going to tell you a bit about my design process for the Circle of the Hive, an archetype that I’ve been developing on and off for quite some time. I’m very happy with how the archetype turned out. For me, it’s particularly interesting in that it is an archetype adapted from a character from an existing work of fiction, and that sort of homebrew writing has a special pile of new issues to contend with. Hopefully, I’ll be able to offer some insights into how to adapt some of your own favorite characters.

So, before we go any farther, I warn you that this article will contain minor spoilers for the web serial Worm, as the Circle of the Hive is an adaptation of its protagonist. If memory serves, nothing I talk about will matter as a spoiler past arc 3-4 (out of 30), so have that in mind as you decide if minor spoilers matter to you. If you want to go in completely blind, now would be the time to jump ship.
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Now, let’s dig in, shall we?

As I said, I made the Circle of the Hive as a 5e version of Worm’s protagonist, Taylor Hebert, better known as Skitter, a ‘cape’ (Worm’s term for superpowered humans, heroic or otherwise), with the ability to control insects on a massive scale. Skitter’s abilities have a broad sweep of applications, which presented a problem for me as I began to adapt her powerset to 5e; how do I include as many of the distinctive and interesting abilities that make a DnD-Skitter exciting to play, while not making the archetype too complicated or powerful? After all, if I went to convert Skitter with no change, I’d have a character with constant, ‘3 city block’ radius insect plague made of arcane eyes, and that doesn’t even approach being a balanced player character. So, again, what are the parts that are most important, most defining?

The answer, for me, was to hone in on what the core of her toolkit was, and to find how best to express it. Skitter makes use of a lot of specialized tricks and tactics over the course of Worm, but the core even from the beginning was her skill at managing and disrupting her enemies on and off the battlefield. All the tricks she incorporates are in service to that end, and so that is what I focused on first.

Battlefield control and communion with animals are druids’ specialty, so I knew almost immediately that this was the class I would be building for. This was good, since there are lots of ways to expand a spellcaster’s toolkit. Not only would I have the archetype’s features to play with, I could also expand the spells available to the archetype to sneak more things into the character’s abilities. Web and arcane eye are the two notable new additions, the first because of flavor and function, and the second mostly for function. The other spells are also there for flavor, but they are either already druid spells or infestation, so none of them constitute a major power or utility change. In the end, the archetype features would end up doing most of the heavy lifting to adapt the character.

So, as anyone who knows Worm is aware, Skitter spends the majority of her time in combat surrounded by a mixed swarm of insects. This habit is what led me to an ‘insect aura’ solution for the most foundational features of the class. While controlling millions of creatures at once is preposterous for any DnD table to manage, an aura made of those creatures is much easier, and there was precedent for that sort of effect coming from a druid already, thanks to Circle of Spores. However, unlike Spores, Hive would be much larger, and much more about disruption than damage. Swarmcaller used the same ‘resource frame’ as Halo of Spores and Symbiotic Entity (reactions to activate, and Wild Shape to empower for 10 minutes), but with a very different effect. The specific ways that Swarmcaller hampered enemies was the most playtesting-intensive, since early levels need the most careful balancing. Certain effects were swapped a few times between being on marked creatures at any time, versus any creature in the swarm aura, versus only on marked creatures while the swarm was active. After much debate, we are confident that the feature is strong without being too dominating.

As I moved on to the later features, I felt I had room to indulge in a few more flavor-first designs, and I’m very happy with how Exoskeletal Espionage and Hivebender’s Vanguard ended up. Both are taken directly from Skitter’s early toolkit, as her surveillance via planted bugs is perhaps her most used trick, and ‘swarm clones’ are one of the first techniques she develops to confuse her opponents. We’ll see how long it takes for me to write a third feature that boils down to ‘conjure animals but weirder’, something tells me not all that long (for the curious). These features are designed to be new options rather than major power boosts, so they were not nearly as intensive to test and balance.

For the capstone, I chose to adapt Skitter’s ‘signature move’ as a once-per-long-rest, since the adaptation would feel incomplete otherwise. When Skitter tries to seriously ruin someone’s day, it usually looks like a combination of Hivemaster’s Tomb and insect plague, and so I am glad that you can in fact do that now, rules as written, starting at level 14. To make the feature as close to how it appears in Worm, I got to play off of the tragically underused suffocation rules, which was an interesting thing to get to use. We decided to include a sidebar, since I imagine a lot of players have never even read the rules on holding your breath before (unless you played Saltmarsh, I guess? I don’t know what’s in that book, pirates or something), but it makes for an odd sort of capstone. It has the potential to ruin someone’s life in a handful of rounds if they can’t make the save the first time, but if they resist, it could still get them later on. As written, a creature with 20 Constitution could hold on for 6 full minutes before it begins choking, which is less than the 10 that Swarmcaller lasts for, meaning even extremely hardy creatures will die eventually if you lock them down. It presents an interesting sort of challenge for the party, since if they can delay long enough, some creatures are nearly guaranteed to die.

That about covers it, at least for now. Let us know what you think of Circle of the Hive, and tell us how it plays if you use it! We always love to hear players get excited about our content. We’ll be back next Monday with a new project, as always, so we’ll see you all then!

-James the Snickering Ghoul

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