College of Woe

College of Woe is home to bards who sing songs of agony, grief, pain, and sorrow. They are not like ordinary bards who tell tales of glorious battles, and stories with happy endings.

Bards who experience painful events and who survive immense tragedies generally choose this path. People generally look at them with both fear and mercy. Their performances are laced with melancholic emotions. The weight of their emotions captures the minds of their audience, and fills them with the same feeling, breaking their spirit and killing their desire to live. As they grow in power, these emotions become deeper.

Song of Grief

When you join the College of Woe at 3rd level, you gain the ability to sing mournfully in a way that enchants your enemies with grief and sorrow, killing their desire to act.

As a bonus action, you can expend one use of Bardic Inspiration to sing a song of grief. When you do so, sorrows of painful memories fill the air. You choose a number of creatures who can hear you within 60 feet of you, up to a number equal to your Charisma modifier (minimum of one). The targets’ speed decreases by 5 feet, and they must make a Charisma saving throw. On a failed save, their dedication and desire to live are replaced with grief and sorrow, and they cannot use a reaction until the end of their next turn.

As you grow in power, you see more of the agony that this life has to offer, and the well of sorrow inside you grows. As a result, the decrease in the target creatures’ speed becomes 10 feet at 5th level, 15 feet at 10th level, and 20 feet at 14th level.

Agonizing Performance

Starting at 3rd level, you can make your performances charged with woe.

If you perform for at least 1 minute and succeed on a DC 13 Charisma (Performance) check, you can attempt to fill your audience with pain, whether with your words, your dance, or with any other type of performance. At the end of the performance, you choose a number of humanoids within 60 feet of you who watched and listened to all of it, up to a number equal to your Charisma modifier (minimum of one). Each target must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw against your spell save DC. On a failed save, the target is filled with emotional agony.

While affected by this feature, the target cannot help itself and starts to cry or is lost deep in its thoughts. It cannot concentrate on spells and its speed decreases by 10 feet. These effects end if a target takes any damage, if you attack it, if it witnesses you attacking or damaging any of its allies, or after 1 hour. On a successful save, the target does not understand that you tried to affect it.

Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you finish a short or long rest.

Real Pain

At 6th level, visuals start to accompany your mournful melodies.

As a bonus action, you can affect a creature within 60 feet of you. It must succeed on a Wisdom saving throw or it relives the most painful moments of its life, feeling excruciating pain once again, and takes 1d4 psychic damage. This effect stays active for 1 minute or until your concentration is broken (as if you were concentrating on a spell). During this time, you can deal the same damage to the targets you have hit as a bonus action on each of your turns.

Any creature who fails its saving throw for Song of Grief or Agonizing Performance cannot resist the effects of this feature.

Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you finish a long rest. As you advance in your levels and witness the pains of life more, you can reflect it better. The damage dealt by this feature increases to 1d6 at 10th level and to 1d8 at 14th level.

Avatar of Woe

At 14th level, you start to carry the weight of the world, all you have witnessed, all the pain you experienced or caused, on your shoulders, changing your outlook on everything completely.

You now look utterly devastated, grim and dark.

In addition, as a bonus action, you can call upon all of this woe to come to your aid for 1 minute, or until you are incapacitated.

For the duration, an Avatar of Woe fights alongside you and introduces others to feelings of pain and agony.

Once you use this feature, you can’t do so again until you finish a short or long rest.