The Dark Urge

Obtain a Dark Urge for your character, or develop Psionic powers that you can evolve! Backgrounds and Feats you can obtain from 1st level!

To go along with our video on the Dark Urge (a Bhaalspawn of the God of Murder), I’ve put together a really cool packet for you all. I know it’s expected of me to say this, but this one is genuinely the coolest one by far.

This packet is entirely player-facing content and introduces a way to play a character driven by either dark impulses or psionic power using only Backgrounds and Origin Feats. I designed it this way so you could choose a new form of advancement for your character without having to touch classes or subclasses, and I’m honestly very happy with how the idea turned out. The concept is simple: at 1st level you pick a Background and an Origin Feat, which grant you a set of baseline powers, and then you upgrade those powers through feats as you advance. That’s it. With Origin Feats now part of 5e in 2024, it opens the door for me to do more of this kind of design. I believe that with a strong design concept on the Origin Feat, a compelling premise for the theme, and a set of scaling feats, this system can end up being an extremely fun way to customize your character while still leaving every class choice open to you. Curious to see how you guys enjoy it.

This packet comes with two backgrounds. The first is the Haunted One (directly inspired by the Dark Urge) which grants Heroic Inspiration whenever you act on the specific urge you’ve chosen for your character, with 'Murder' serving as the default theme. Alongside it are five normal feats, each of which interacts with Heroic Inspiration by either expanding how you gain it or offering exciting new ways to spend it.

The second background is the Psionic, designed to let a character develop and evolve their psionic powers as they gain more feats (similarly inspired by the psionic growth characters experience in Baldurs Gate 3). This background/Origin Feat grants you Psionic Points, which you can spend to cast specific psionic spells. The packet includes 13 psionic feats, and each one you take increases your pool of Psionic Points, allowing you to cast more and more psionic magic as you do. I really tried to cover the full range of possibilities for what a psionic character can do, so I’m excited to see what you all create with these new options!

Some Artwork © 2015 Dean Spencer, used with permission. All rights reserved.