Uncovering Unearthed Arcana

(Blurred image of the AD&D UA book)

    I have played Dungeons & Dragons for some amount of time now, and it has stuck with me as one of my most consistent and favored hobbies. You can do anything and be basically anyone! Be a dwarven cleric who bad mouths the church; an elven monk working in reconnaissance;  or even a wholesome and hug loving barbarian orc. The possibilities are endless... but not really. In the game itself you are given a choice of 12 basic classes, each of them having their own subclasses which give you unique abilities and flavor. Despite of this, the official ones in the Players Handbook (PHB) get a bit bland in terms of creativity and flavor after a really long while. The same can go to character races, their subraces, and even the mechanics of the game itself.

    Luckily, D&D is a game where creativity and narrative rules supreme, so there are many remedies to the issue of blandness found in character creation and gameplay. Homebrew is one, where the players and game masters can collaborate together in adding fun and cool new rules and content to their games, because D&D can be played very differently to different people. It's basically creating anything outside that of the official books from Wizards of the Coasts (WoTC), like spells, classes, races, rules, etc. The Game Master (GM) of any table has the supreme final say on anything regarding rules (sorry Jeremy Crawford), for the fun of everyone else; including the allowance of certain homebrews for sake of game balancing and narrative. There are no exact guidelines for homebrew, just talk to your GM about what you want to do, and work it out form there.

    But, what if you are too lazy to come up with a bunch of homebrew rules and stuff? Well, there are teams of people in WoTC with cool ideas they plan to add to the game, and content they want to try for new source books like Tasha's Cauldron of Everything or even Explorers Guide to Wildemount. This wacky limbo between a crazy cool idea and official game stuff is called UNEARTHED ARCANA and it is as beautiful as it is very crazy.

Origins, History, and Today

    As many of you who played D&D know (or not), the game was created by an American game designer named Gary Gygax. The first edition of D&D, titled "Advanced Dungeons and Dragons", was first released in 1974 under game publisher TSR. This began a very rich and long history of roleplaying games and their impact in societal culture, even until today. As interesting as that is, I'll discuss it in a different article.

    Anyways. Along the road, TSR came into some financial trouble with being deep in debt during the 1980's. Because of this, Gygax reportedly decided to write an expansion book to add on to AD&D in hopes to raise more money for TSR to bring them out of debt. In 1985, the release of Unearthed Arcana was announced in the March issue of Dragon Magazine and its release in the summer of that year; it was proposed as an expansion to the Dungeon Masters Guide and Players Handbook during the time. The original book contained two separate sections dedicated to the GM and the players respectively, with new races, classes, expansions to existing ones, and other material

    By the time the first Unearthed Arcana book was released, it contained new material, and content that was released in some magazines beforehand. The original book was received pretty badly by the press during the time due to overpowered mechanics and wide plethora of errors and other issues. 

    After a lot of drama in regards to the departure of Gary Gygax from TSR in 1986, the controversy between D&D and religious groups up to the release of 2nd Edition AD&D, Wizards of the Coast purchased TSR and Five Rings Publishing Group in April 1997 and began working on Dungeons and Dragons 3rd Edition (or D&D 3e). 3E introduced sweeping revisions to how the game was played, including the introduction of the 20-sided Die, and other multi sided dice. 

    Andy Collins, Jesse Decker, David Noonan, and Rich Redman worked on the second Unearthed Arcana book to be a supplement to the rules set in D&D 3e, and released the book under WoTC in February 2007. The book was aimed for players and GMs looking for something new in the game, providing long lists of variant rules and options to manipulate the games standard along with new spells, races, classes, and other content. 

    Following the release of Dungeons and Dragons 5th Edition (D&D 5e) in July 2014, the version of the game we all know and love today, Unearthed Arcana turned from being a physical hardcover book to be purchased, into a monthly column of free PDF articles released in the official D&D website. The purpose of Unearthed Arcana today under 5e is to be a playtest of new game mechanics and content prototypes that people will hopefully see in the release of new source books by WoTC. 

My Hot Take.

    Personally, I first thought that content from Unearthed Arcana was banned, made by fans, and even not affiliated at all with D&D in an official corporate sense. I really hated Unearthed Arcana when I started to GM games for the first time in late 2019, due to my huge lack of knowledge of how the game actually works, and my opinions of how 'overpowered' it is (which is true for a lot of UA). Now I have embraced it! Because there are a lot of cool things in Unearthed Arcana that later on became official D&D mechanics, like the wide variety of optional rules and mechanics for classes released from Tasha's Cauldron for Everything. 

    There is a diverse amount of cool content under UA, like the School of Onomancy for the Wizard class; Revised Ranger (cos the class sucked); and Mass Combat (which sets mechanics for MILITARY COMBAT!). It opens up a wider world in terms of what you can add on to your character as a player, and what chaos you can put in place in your world as a GM.

    This doesn't mean that all the things are UA are good though. There are certainly bad things found in UA. Lets use the Mass Combat rules mentioned earlier as an example, because I tried integrating it into my table. It is extremely clunky and hard to understand, involving large numbers just for stats and conditions just to see where the unit gets on in initiative. There are also complex rules over who wins in a battle between two combat units which require constant reference to math's to see if the unit is completely obliterated, looses a smidge of "morale", or goes scot free. Not to mention a long list of rules and mechanics on how to even create a combat unit and how its size can affect basically everything. 

    What I am saying is: "It's very stupid" and things like this can apply to other Unearthed Arcana content as well, which is why its probably for the best that UA content serves as a playtesting ground for new content, so that bad stuff can be hammered out into cool stuff. 

    So if you want to spice up your games and if your fellow players something new, Unearthed Arcana is always there to provide new and fun content that would potentially get added to official D&D material (Just pray the UA Mystic Class gets fixed up...).

- YugiBearz