Table of Contents
Drifter
A young archer whistles from high in a tree. Indistinguishable from the call of a bird, they signal the arrival of Earth Kingdom soldiers. The people in the nearby town ready themselves to spring into action, inspired to take back the fruits of their labor.
Having walked for a number of days equal to her age, an Air Nomad descends from the peaks to see the world. Glider on her back, she is a sign of good fortune for a down on their luck Fire Clan constantly under the thumb of their more powerful neighbors.
A man with a gruff beard slouches in the corner of a darkly lit tavern. He peers over the rim of a dented mug as he takes a gulp of ale, listening to the bartender tell tale of the spirit that’s been haunting the woods. He puts down his mug and offers his service. This could be just the fight he’s been looking for.
Ever wandering from place to place, the drifter is not lost, nor have they a home. Each has their own reason for taking to the road, but all carry their story along with them.
Level | Proficiency Bonus | Features | Basics Known | Techniques Known | Technique Level |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
1st | +2 | Survivalist, Fighting Style, Drifter Lifestyle | |||
2nd | +2 | Bending, Environmental Awareness | 1 | 2 | 1st |
3rd | +2 | Drifter Lifestyle Feature | 1 | 3 | 1st |
4th | +2 | Ability Score Improvement | 1 | 3 | 1st |
5th | +3 | Extra Attack | 1 | 4 | 2nd |
6th | +3 | Survivalist Improvement | 1 | 5 | 2nd |
7th | +3 | Natural Instinct | 1 | 6 | 2nd |
8th | +3 | Ability Score Improvement | 1 | 6 | 2nd |
9th | +4 | Drifter Lifestyle Feature | 2 | 7 | 3rd |
10th | +4 | Seasoned Immunity | 2 | 7 | 3rd |
11th | +4 | Hide in Plain Sight | 2 | 8 | 3rd |
12th | +4 | Ability Score Improvement | 2 | 8 | 3rd |
13th | +5 | Drifter Lifestyle Feature | 2 | 9 | 4th |
14th | +5 | Vanish | 2 | 9 | 4th |
15th | +5 | Elusive Mind | 2 | 10 | 4th |
16th | +5 | Ability Score Improvement | 2 | 10 | 4th |
17th | +6 | Drifter Lifestyle Feature | 3 | 11 | 5th |
18th | +6 | Keen Senses | 3 | 11 | 5th |
19th | +6 | Ability Score Improvement | 3 | 12 | 5th |
20th | +6 | Drifter Lifestyle Feature | 3 | 12 | 5th |
As a drifter, you gain the following class features.
Hit Points
Hit Dice: 1d10 per drifter level
Hit Points at 1st Level: 10 + your Constitution modifier
Hit Points at Higher Levels: 1d10 (or 6) + your Constitution modifier each time you gain a level in this class
Chi Points
Chi Dice: 1d6 per drifter level
Chi Points at 1st Level: 6 + your Wisdom modifier
Chi Points at Higher Levels: 1d6 (or 4) + your Wisdom modifier each time you gain a level in this class
Proficiencies
Armor: Light armor, Medium armor, shields
Weapons: Simple weapons, Martial weapons without the two-handed property
Tools: One gaming set or musical instrument
Saving Throws: Dexterity, Wisdom
Skills: Choose three from Acrobatics, Animal Handling, Athletics, Insight, Nature, Perception, Stealth, and Survival
Equipment
You start with the following equipment, in addition to the equipment granted by your background:
- (a) a longbow and 20 arrows, (b) any martial weapon, or (c) any two simple weapons
- (a) hide armor or (b) leather armor
- (a) a dungeoneer’s pack or (b) an explorer’s pack
- Two daggers
Drifter Lifestyle
“Not all those who wander are lost.” Choose the way of life that keeps you on the move: Monk, Ranger, or Sellsword. Each lifestyle is described at the end of the class description.
Your choice grants you features when you choose it at 1st level and again at 3rd, 9th, 13th, 17th, and 20th level.
Survivalist
You are particularly familiar with one type of natural environment and are adept at traveling and surviving in such regions. Choose one type of familiar terrain: arctic, coast, desert, forest, grassland, mountain, swamp, or urban. When you make an Intelligence or Wisdom check related to your favored terrain, your proficiency bonus is doubled if you are using a skill that you’re proficient in.
While traveling for an hour or more in your favored terrain, you gain the following benefits:
- Difficult terrain doesn’t slow your group’s travel.
- Your group can’t become lost except by spiritual or energetic intervention.
- Even when you are engaged in another activity while traveling (such as foraging, navigating, or tracking), you remain alert to danger.
- If you are traveling alone, you can move stealthily at a normal pace.
- When you forage, you find twice as much food as you normally would.
- While tracking other creatures, you also learn their exact number, their sizes, and how long ago they passed through the area.
At 6th level, you are able to extrapolate your knowledge to all terrains.
Fighting Style
Also at 1st level, you adopt a particular style of fighting as your specialty. Choose one of the following options. You can’t take a Fighting Style option more than once, even if you later get to choose again.
Range
You gain a +2 bonus to ranged attack rolls.
Defense
While you are in stance or wearing armor, you gain a +1 bonus to AC.
Dueling
When you attack a target on successive turns, you gain a +2 bonus to damage rolls against the target on each turn after the first.
Endurance
Unless you are unconscious, you regain 1 hit point at the end of each of your turns in combat.
Stamina
You gain 1 additional chi point for each level gained in this class.
Two-Handed
When you engage in two-weapon fighting or use a bending technique with your offhand, you can add your ability modifier to the damage of the second attack.
Environmental Awareness
Beginning at 2nd level, you can use your action and expend 1 chi point to focus your awareness on the region around you. For 1 minute, you can sense whether there are hostile creatures within 1 mile of you, and what type or types of creatures they are. Each additional chi point you expend on this feature, increases the duration of your awareness by 1 minute, and expands the radius by 1 mile. This feature doesn’t reveal the creatures’ location or number.
Bending
Also, by 2nd level your attention to the energy in and around you has unlocked the door to altering your surroundings. See chapter 10 for the general rules of bending and chapter 11 for the drifter technique list.
Basics
At 2nd level, you know one basic of your choice from the drifter technique list. Alternatively, if you are an elemental bender, you can choose a basic from your elemental bending technique list. You learn additional drifter basics of your choice at higher levels, as shown in the Basics Known column of the Drifter table.
Techniques Known of 1st Level and Higher
As a drifter, you come to understand bending through observation and personal practice. At 2nd level, you know two 1st level techniques of your choice from the Drifter technique list. Alternatively, if you are an elemental bender, you can choose techniques from your elemental bending technique list.
The Techniques Known column of the Drifter table shows when you learn more techniques of your choice. The Technique Level column of the Drifter table shows what level techniques you are able to learn at each level. When you reach 9th level, for example, you can learn a technique of 1st, 2nd, or 3rd level.
The techniques that you learn as you level up in this class represent your natural growth and progression as a bender. Since they come to you naturally, you do not have to go through the process of mastering them. To learn additional bending techniques, they must be on the drifter technique list and you have to either be taught by somebody who can perform the technique or find the technique on a bending scroll. Techniques learned in these ways have to be mastered as described in the Mastery Points section of chapter 10.
Using Techniques
To use a technique, you must expend an amount of chi equal to the technique’s level. If you do not have enough chi available to you, you cannot perform the technique or the technique fails. If you try to use a technique you have not mastered yet and it fails, you expend chi equal to half the technique’s level (rounded down).
You are able to learn and perform techniques of a level equal to or lower than the level shown in the Drifter table’s Technique Level column for your level. If a technique can be used at multiple levels, you can use it at any level at or below the level shown in the Drifter table’s Technique Level column for your level.
Bending Ability
Wisdom is your bending ability for your drifter techniques since your bending relies on your intuitive understanding of the flow of energy. You use your Wisdom whenever a technique refers to your bending ability. You use your Wisdom modifier when setting the saving throw DC for a drifter technique you use and when making an attack roll with one.
Technique save DC = 8 + your proficiency bonus + your Wisdom modifier
Technique attack modifier = your proficiency bonus + your Wisdom modifier
If you are an elemental bender, you are able to extrapolate what you learn through your class to your elemental bending as well. Thus, you can choose whether to use your elemental bending abilities or your drifter bending ability for your elemental bending techniques.
Ability Score Improvement
When you reach 4th level, and again at 8th, 12th, 16th, and 19th level, you can increase one ability score of your choice by 2, or you can increase two ability scores of your choice by 1. As normal, you can’t increase an ability score above 20 using this feature.
Extra Attack
Beginning at 5th level, you can attack twice, instead of once, whenever you take the Attack action on your turn.
Natural Instinct
By 7th level, your instincts are so honed that you have advantage on initiative rolls.
Additionally, if you are surprised at the beginning of combat and aren’t incapacitated, you can act normally on your first turn.
Seasoned Immunity
By 10th level, through the course of your travels you have built up an immunity to disease and poison.
Hide in Plain Sight
Starting at 11th level, you can spend 1 minute creating camouflage for yourself. You must have access to fresh mud, dirt, plants, soot, or other materials with which to create your camouflage.
Once you are camouflaged in this way, you can try to hide by pressing yourself up against a solid surface, such as a tree or wall, that is at least as tall and wide as you are. You gain a +10 bonus to Dexterity (Stealth) checks as long as you remain there without moving or taking actions. Once you move or take an action or a reaction, you must camouflage yourself again to gain this benefit.
Vanish
Starting at 14th level, you can use the Hide action as a bonus action on your turn. Also, you can’t be tracked except by energetic or spiritual means, unless you choose to leave a trail behind.
Elusive Mind
By 15th level, you have acquired greater mental strength. You gain proficiency in Intelligence and Wisdom saving throws.
Keen Senses
At 18th level, you gain preternatural senses that help you fight creatures you can’t see. When you attack a creature you can’t see, your inability to see it doesn’t impose disadvantage on your attack rolls against it.
You are also aware of the location of any creature within 30 feet of you, even if you cannot see it, provided that the creature isn’t hidden from you and you aren’t blinded or deafened.
Day by day, night by night, place by place, person by person, so goes the life of the drifter. Living one day at a time, finding their way, needing nothing more than a meal and a place to stay. The drifter is oft alone, having relinquished their ties for a life unattached. It’s not always easy, but the trade off for having to brave the dangers and uncertainty, is the joy of living a simple life where actions are intentional and one can find meaning in just living another day.
Monk
Martial Arts
At 1st level, your practice of martial arts gives you mastery of combat styles that use unarmed strikes and monk weapons, which are shortswords, whips, and any simple melee weapons that don’t have the two-handed or heavy property.
You gain the following benefits while you are unarmed or wielding only monk weapons and you aren’t wearing armor or wielding a shield:
- You can use Dexterity instead of Strength for the attack and damage rolls of your unarmed strikes and monk weapons.
- You can roll a d4 in place of the normal damage of your unarmed strike or monk weapon. This die increases to a d6 at 3rd level, d8 at 9th level, d10 at 13th level, and d12 at 17th level.
- When you use the Attack action with an unarmed strike or a monk weapon on your turn, you can make one unarmed strike as a bonus action. For example, if you take the Attack action and attack with a quarterstaff, you can also make an unarmed strike as a bonus action, assuming you haven’t already taken a bonus action this turn.
Certain monasteries use specialized forms of the monk weapons. For example, you might use a club that is two lengths of wood connected by a short chain (called a nunchaku) or a sickle with a shorter, straighter blade (called a kama). Whatever name you use for a monk weapon, you can use the game statistics provided for the weapon in chapter 5.
Unarmored
Also at 3rd level, while you are wearing no armor and not wielding a shield, your AC equals 10 + your Dexterity modifier + your Wisdom modifier.
Additionally, your speed increases by 10 feet while you are not wearing armor or wielding a shield. This bonus increases to 20 feet at 9th level and 30 feet at 17th level.
Tranquility
Beginning at 9th level, you can enter a special meditation that surrounds you with an aura of peace. At the end of a long rest, you gain the effect of the sanctuary technique, lasting until the start of your next long rest (the technique can end early as normal).
Diamond Soul
Beginning at 13th level, your infallible internal strength combined with your mastery of chi manipulation grant you proficiency in Strength and Charisma saving throws.
Additionally, whenever you make a saving throw and fail, you can spend 1 chi point to reroll it and take the second result.
Empty Body
At 17th level, you’ve learned to separate your spirit from your body through meditation. You are able to use the astral projection technique as a meditation. Once you use this feature, you must finish a long rest before you can use it again.
Additionally, you are able to sustain yourself for up to one month without eating.
Perfect Self
At 20th level, when you roll for initiative and have no chi points remaining, you regain 10 chi points.
Ranger
Bonus Proficiency
When you choose this lifestyle at 1st level, you gain proficiency with longbows and heavy crossbows.
Favored Enemy
At 1st level, you have significant experience studying, tracking, hunting, even talking to a certain type of enemy.
Choose one type of favored enemy: beasts, dragons, elementals, giants, monstrosities, plants, spirits, or people of a nation of your choice. You have advantage on Wisdom (Survival) checks to track your favored enemies, as well as on Intelligence checks to recall or obtain information about them.
At 9th and 17th level, you choose one additional favored energy. As you gain levels, your choices should reflect the types of monsters you have encountered on your adventures.
Hunter’s Mark
At 3rd level, you learn to mark your enemy, focusing your energy entirely on hunting them down.
As a bonus action, you can expend 1 chi point to mark a creature within 120 feet of you whose type is one that you’ve chosen as your favored enemy. For the next hour, you deal an extra 1d6 damage to the marked target whenever you hit it with an attack, and you have advantage on any Wisdom (Perception) check you make to find it.
You can only mark one creature at a time. If you attempt to mark a second creature while you have another creature marked, you lose the first mark.
Your mark duration increases to 8 hours at 9th level and to 24 hours at 17th level.
Defensive Tactics
At 9th level, you gain one of the following features of your choice.
Escape the Pack. Opportunity attacks against you are made with disadvantage, and you can use the Dash action as a bonus action on your turn.
Multiattack Defense. When a creature hits you with an attack, you gain a +5 bonus to AC against all subsequent attacks made by that creature for the rest of the turn.
Nerves of Steel. You have advantage on saving throws against being frightened and are immune to being frightened by your favored enemies.
Natural Familiar
Beginning at 13th level, you can use the commune with nature technique, but only as a meditation. When you do so, a natural spirit from your surroundings visits you in a vision to convey the information you seek.
Hit the Mark
By 17th level, you have become so proficient at hunting your enemies that you are able to hit your mark with deadly precision. When making attacks against creatures your favored enemy, you have advantage on attack rolls and your ranged attacks ignore half and three-quarters cover.
Unrivaled Hunter
At 20th level, you become a skilled hunter of all enemies. You are able to use your Hunter’s Mark to mark any creature, not only your chosen enemies, and the maximum number of creatures you are able to mark at a time increases by a number equal to your Wisdom modifier (a minimum of one).
Sellsword
Dissidents’ Code
In your time finding work from anyone willing to pay, you’ve come to learn the dissidents’ code, a secret mix of dialect, jargon, and code that allows you to hide messages in seemingly normal conversation. Only another person that knows dissidents’ code understands such messages. It takes four times longer to convey such a message than it does to speak the same idea plainly.
In addition, you understand a set of secret signs and symbols used to convey short, simple messages, such as whether an area is dangerous or the territory of an underground order, whether loot is nearby, or whether people in an area are easy marks or will provide a safe house for people on the run.
Bravado
Starting at 1st level, you have an unflappable air confidence that allows you to keep your composure, and propels you headlong into battle. You can add your Charisma modifier (a minimum of 1) as a bonus to your initiative rolls.
Crafty Maneuvers
Starting at 3rd level, when you use a maneuver, you can add your Charisma modifier to your Technique save DC.
Outmaneuver
At 9th level, you can use a reaction to make an attack of opportunity any time a hostile creature targets you with a maneuver.
Silver Tongue
Starting at 13th level, you are a master at saying the right thing at the right time. When you make a Charisma (Persuasion) or Charisma (Deception) check, you can treat a d20 roll of 9 or lower as a 10.
Master Duelist
Beginning at 17th level, your crafty nature allows you to turn failure into success in combat. If you miss with a melee attack, you can expend 1 chi point to reroll the attack with advantage as a bonus action.
Battle Slayer
At 20th level, your unparalleled confidence on the battlefield shows in your fighting. Once on each of your turns, you can add your Charisma modifier to the attack roll or the damage roll of an attack you make. You can choose to use this feature before or after the roll, but before any effects of the roll are applied.