Oath of Society | Paladin Sacred Oath, and a lesson in learning

What a throwback, and in more ways than one! The Oath of Society is, in some senses, one of my oldest homebrews. It started life as the Oath of the Lyan, inspired by the Lyan class found in issue #106 of Dragon magazine, from an article called "A Plethora of Paladins." Since this was 1986, class alignment restrictions still existed, so all paladins had to be Lawful Good. But with this article, no more was that true! Now there existed a paladin-like class for every alignment! …As long as you were an NPC, at least, according to the article.

Anyhow, some 30 years later, I hear about the article, I think it's cool, and I go about making one of my very, very first homebrews. I would probably be embarrassed if you saw the original drafts of this Sacred Oath! Not that I should feel that way⁠—after all, it was all part of the learning process for me. I had to make certain blunders early on in order to learn why they were blunders, in order to learn how to make better content. For me, better meant more balanced, more creative, more focused, more thematic, more reasonable within Fifth Edition.

I went on to revisit the Oath of the Lyan several times. With the help and advice of many homebrew peers, I revised the brew to balance the mechanics, or to improve the flavor of the subclass. I eventually renamed it to Oath of Society, I removed or overhauled certain features more than once, and eventually I even made a second homebrew spell for the list, fair weather.

Today, the Oath of Society is one of my personal favorites from the homebrew I've created. It was the first Sacred Oath I ever homebrewed, the first time I ever used a homebrew spell in the spells list (with permission for commune with civilization, never fear!), and the first time I ever made a sidebar with optional variant features to fill out flavor that didn't otherwise fit into the rest of the homebrew. And each of those are things I went on to do many more times! Especially the 'homebrew a Sacred Oath' one. That's… that's gonna happen a lot.

(Link to the GM Binder version)