Wizards of the Coast is continuing to use its Unearthed Arcana playtest material to bring ideas from Dungeons & Dragons 3.0/3.5 into the 2024 5th edition ruleset. The April 2 release, “Villainous Options,” borrows rules from the 2004 book Libris Mortis: The Book of the Undead for slowly turning your living character undead and offers a Pestilence Domain for Clerics that’s reminiscent of the Vermin Lord in 2002’s Book of Vile Darkness. But the most diabolically fun option is a new one: the Circle of the Titan druid, which lets you protect nature by turning into an enormous monster.
Circle of the Moon druids can already get pretty big at high levels, turning into a huge dinosaur or the King Kong-like giant ape. But Titan Form lets you reach gargantuan size at level 14. Gargantuan creatures occupy at least 20 by 20-feet area. The Tarrasque, for example, is considered gargantuan and is canonically 50 feet tall and 70 feet long — but there’s no upper limit on the size of gargantuan creatures. In other words, you can absolutely stomp your way around the battlefield as a modest-sized kaiju. According to the playtest, “Druids of this order believe that for nature to thrive, society must sometimes fall.” Basically your job is to smash cities to restore balance.
The class does a great job of evoking the chaos of a rampaging kaiju. You default to a large form, hitting the huge size at level 10. You can charge your rend attacks with an element of your choice to scorch, freeze, or shock your enemies. When you first transform, you can spend a spell slot to knock everyone around you down with a shockwave. Once you hit huge, you’re so big you don’t even have to deal with difficult terrain. That’s good because you’re going to be leaving a lot of rubble in your wake.
Things get even more ridiculous when you hit gargantuan size. You can grapple creatures and then swallow them whole as a bonus action, slowly digesting them in your stomach acid. You can even have multiple creatures in your gullet at once — the number is capped by your wisdom modifier. Keeping them down requires concentration checks, so the War Caster feat is pretty much mandatory for this build to give you advantage on those rolls. If you do fail, you puke up whoever you ate.
The Circle of the Titan offers three different forms you can choose from whenever you wild shape. Behemoth is a classic Godzilla-like beast that’s particularly good at smashing objects and packs a nasty breath weapon. Leviathan is an amphibious monster that emits a toxic stench and can escape in an inky cloud. Mothra fans will want to check out the Insectoid form which flies, communicates telepathically, and can even provide some healing with energizing pollen.
Circle of the Titan druid isn’t an especially practical class. Most dungeons don’t have room for a gargantuan creature to move around except maybe in the final boss room. But Circle of the Titan could make for a very fun and threatening villain for groups putting together an evil party or Dungeon Masters looking for a new threat for wherever their player characters call home.
