Behind the Screen: Building a Subclass - Familiar Wizard

In The Lazarus Expedition, one of our characters has been trying to use a familiar as a weapon by casting spells through it. It's a fun idea, but familiars are weak, quickly killed, and their timing of movement is awkward. To make this a more viable build, I've created the Familiar Wizard subclass. No longer specializing in a school of magic, our wizard improves their familiar over time. The familiar must still abide by all the rules in the spell Find Familiar, unless they are specifically overridden. Each familiar type would probably need its own layout of abilities, but here I have provided stats and abilities for the Giant Fire Beetle that we're using in our game.

My player, PokemonChallenges, hasn't reviewed the document yet, and might have some pushback or feedback that will end up with later adjustments, but attached here are both the screenshots of my notebook and the draft being sent to the players.

The pages are in order of their writing, so you'll note a few things.

Page 1
The top of this has notes from a previous session, but is otherwise a rough draft of ideas. I quickly scrapped the notion of breaking the creature down into two tech trees of mental and physical abilities, but it was a start.

Page 2
The core concept of making Vika (our familiar) bigger and badder or giving him more utility is shown here, as well as the two most fundamental abilities: Synchronized Thoughts and Shared Experiences. These are really what turns Vika from sort of a useless extension into something workable. This is still an early rendition, and much is changed by the end.

Page 3
Vika's final forms in the giant / greater version. We moved from abilities on short rests to recharges, and cleaned up the wording a lot. While these forms are big and strong, their bite attack (which if you do the math is pretty solid) cannot be used in combat as per the rules of Find Familiar. But their knock down abilities... those can. This gives our familiars some CC which is especially useful since Roy (the character) will be taking his turn right afterwards.

Page 4
Now that we're at the end of the first full pass, I have a better idea of what is needed and where we are going. These two final forms don't have special attacks like the other two final forms, but have some very solid passive abilities. The Chameleon can lay in wait, blending in with it's amazing stealth, and then ambush enemies with Dragons Breath (wizard spell) or other options. The Flyer is size T and can fly. I cannot undersell how useful the ability to fly is, especially if you can see through your familiar's eyes. It's like an infinite Clairvoyance spell with a local range. We still see changes between here the final draft.

Page 5
At the time this was meant to be a final draft, but once I put things into the nicely formatted PDF version, I realized things still needed adjusting - mostly adjusting at what level things kick in.

Page 6
The wording on abilities is really coming together now. Nice and simple. It can be a struggle coming from 2e to embrace the broad stroke abilities of 5e. Reactive Dismissal for example I wanted to be much more specific on. I wanted it to be only for things you could see coming, like melee attacks and dragon's breath but not hold spells or psychic attacks, yet the wording was just so awkward and it worked out better to keep it simple: Vika can be dismissed as a reaction. Nice and simple.

Page 7
As with the last page, there are things that needed to be added, and some things that needed to be redacted. Most were made after the PDF was put together so that my hand notes would more closely match the files I give out - but in the event that the files get updated after player push back I'll end up rewriting all the notes... or getting lazy and saying "forget it".

Page 8
These abilities should have been under the actions of the evolutions, but somehow got added later. Formatting aside, the wording on these abilities is pretty tight now. Basically the final language.

The PDF
This attached file has more changes in it, but without work being shown. It was made with https://homebrewery.naturalcrit.com/. I struggled over how much to include in the stat blocks, and in the end I removed the Languages - None line so that the stat blocks could stack nicely on a page.

And that's our behind the screen look at how this subclass got made, complete with original notes.

A final note, there's probably an ability at 14th level that needs to be made... but our players will never get there, and its a weird class to begin with. Normally mages get a pretty sick level 14 ability, but this class gets a lot of stuff at earlier levels. If ever players were getting near level 10, I'd sit down and figure out some level 14 stuff. That may require editing the level 10 things too, but one of my fundamental rules of DMing is always keep one eye on the Effort:Reward ratio.

[edit: the PDF has been updated with a change to Fire Beetle Flyer, some clarifying notes, and some fixed typos]