Oath of Anarchy | Paladin Sacred Oath, and on adapting prior editions and on optional variants

After making the Oath of the Lyan, I went on to create the Oath of the Fantra, another Sacred Oath inspired by the same Dragon magazine article I mentioned in the post about the Oath of Society. While the Lyan of that article was the Lawful Neutral version of the paladin, the Fantra was Chaotic Neutral (remember, this is back when class alignment restrictions were a thing). As I became more experienced in homebrewing, my tastes and preferences also evolved, and so I eventually returned to the homebrew for revision, and it was renamed to the more generalized Oath of Anarchy—a nice opposite to the Oath of Society.

Similar to the Oath of Society, I've included in this homebrew a sidebar describing optional variant features. I didn't talk about that much in the Oath of Society post, so I'll talk more about that here.

My original drafts of the Oath of the Lyan and the Oath of the Fantra, back when they were called that, included additional features at 3rd level—basically, the optional variants weren't optional variants back then. However, I came around to feeling that it was better in this case to hew closely to the usual Sacred Oath structure of having only the Oath spells list and the Channel Divinity options at 3rd level. So features like Detect Chaos and Strike the Inflexible were moved to a sidebar. Dances With Wolves was created later, and I think it's my favorite of the three.

So, why have these optional variant features anyway? Why did I create them to begin with, as core features first and later as optional variants?

The first two, Detect Chaos and Strike the Inflexible, were created as a way to convert some of the original Fantra's mechanics and include them in my homebrew. Each of the paladin-likes from "A Plethora" had features that enabled them to inflict bonus damage to creatures of opposing alignments. So the Fantra dealt bonus damage to creatures of lawful alignments, the Lyan dealt bonus damage to creatures of chaotic alignments, etc.

Now, despite being in the process of converting these old, alignment-inspired features, I didn't want to use alignment in the feature I wrote. After all, the base Divine Sense and Divine Smite from the Player's Handbook didn't rely on alignment, but rather on narratively appropriate creature types: fiends and undead (and celestials for Divine Sense). The same was true of Turn the Unholy and Turn the Faithless from the Oaths of Devotion and the Ancients.

So I decided to follow that pattern and define these new features by creature type. For the Oath of Society, Scourge the Chaotic applies the bonus damage of Divine Smite to aberrations and fey. And Turn the Unlawful turns aberrations, demons, and fey. Makes sense!

Then came doing the same with the Oath of Anarchy. But that proved to be trickier. Applying the bonus damage of Divine Smite to constructs made sense, but what other creature type seems as if it were nearly universally lawful? I considered devils, but that's a tag, not a creature type, and I didn't want to break pattern at this point. I eventually chose elementals, on the basis that they're kind of divorced from the uninhibited chaos of nature. Even with that justification, it's a bit kludgey.

There may be a lesson in this. Not everything from an earlier edition can be converted into a Fifth Edition mechanic. It may have been better to leave out Strike the Inflexible. I personally chose to leave it in, because I liked the parallels with its sister subclass, the Oath of Society, but you might choose differently were you in my position.

Now, where did Dances With Wolves come from, the third optional variant in the sidebar? That was added as part of a later revision, when I was changing it from the Oath of the Fantra to Anarchy. I had always had find familiar in the spell list, since I liked the imagery of the Fantra being surrounded by animal allies. Adding Dances With Wolves made sense as a way to make the familiar and steed actual animals. I think it's a better example of a good optional variant feature. It adds fun flavor, but is only a very small mechanical change. I like Scourge the Chaotic and Strike the Inflexible, but they're much bigger changes that I came to discover aren't usually necessary in Sacred Oaths. In these two Oaths (and in one more Sacred Oath I've yet to share), they serve mostly as callbacks to the original classes from Dragon magazine.

In my next post, I think I'll share the third Sacred Oath that was inspired by Dragon's "A Plethora of Paladins," and I'll talk a little bit about why I think an optional variant feature sidebar is the best way to include these types of features in a Sacred Oath in the first place.

(Link to the GM Binder version)