New Spells: Natural Healing Magic
This content can also be found at its most updated version in The Elements and Beyond, a free 246-page compendium that you can download right here, filled with 23 subclasses, 8 spellcasting feats, 134 spells, 213 spell variants, 85 monsters, 30 magic items, 4 races plus 12 new subraces each with racial feats, and even more goodies for both players and DMs!
Links: PDF | D&D Beyond: Renewal, Greater Renewal
“All I can do is speed up her body’s natural healing mechanisms. Now… the rest is on her.”
Art Credit: https://www.deviantart.com/dopaprime/art/LotC-Havart-the-Healer-751915094
Healing magic is an incredibly popular magical archetype, with a huge variety of ways of healing via magic throughout the myriad fantasy settings, stories, games, etc. Most healing magic in D&D works by evoking positive energy into the target, causing their body to recover from wounds and magical injury. But another form of healing is possible, where the magic does not do the healing itself by channeling positive energy, but instead uses transmutative magic to simply speed up the body’s natural healing processes.
Renewal and Greater Renewal are designed to help fill this small void within the edition’s healing spells while also giving spellcasters new ways of fulfilling the classic party role of healing. This kind of healing magic has the benefit of being less strenuous on the spellcaster, but at the cost of expending the target’s own natural vitality, rendering them fatigued or less capable of restoring their wounds in the immediate future, and relying on the target’s own constitution to maximize the healing potential.
We can’t bring up Renewal without talking about the concept of at-will, cantrip-based healing magic. Normally, a cantrip that restores hit points as easily as cure wounds or healing word isn’t within the realm of acceptable design for 5th edition, since it fundamentally changes the nature of resource management throughout the adventuring day by granting extra hit points at nearly no cost at all. Despite this, many groups find that their fantasy settings feel lacking without a way to heal quickly between fights, and find that the healing magic present in 5th edition doesn’t do enough to make it worth using except when in combat with an unconscious ally.
Renewal as a cantrip aims to alleviate these issues without falling prey to the normal traps an at-will healing cantrip runs into. Renewal doesn’t enable characters to heal infinitely or ignore their daily resources, because while it can be cast an unlimited number of times, a target can only heal a limited number of times per day using the spell. In addition, it rarely provides any extra healing throughout the day, since it enables the target to spend hit dice that they likely would have spent eventually anyways, without granting any additional hit dice. In other words, renewal largely speeds up the healing a party can use, allowing them to move forward without having to take an entire short rest to heal, but doesn’t actually change the resources available to that party over the full day. In rare cases, when using the spell on a target with low Constitution, the spell can provide a small number of extra hit points through the minimum amount regained, but this is balanced out by the fact that such a target can spend far fewer hit dice overall using the spell than a target with higher Constitution can.
As for Greater Renewal, this spell serves as a lower-level alternative to heal that carries some hefty downsides to make up for it. This spell even contains Constitution-synergy for the target, meaning that regardless of how many hit points the target has, this healing spell will heal enough for it to be noticeable. It’s also a good example of how the spells in D&D Unleashed make use of many 5th edition mechanics that are underutilized in the official content, such as exhaustion. Exhaustion can be a difficult condition to recover from, but it also presents myriad game opportunities, and so its inclusion in a game can be very rewarding. Since this spell is used by allies on a willing target, it can’t be used to force exhaustion onto a target that doesn’t want it, meaning the negative aspects of exhaustion are only given to players who feel ready to manage them.
Links: PDF | D&D Beyond: Renewal, Greater Renewal
