The Druid: The Treantmonk Variant

Holding high a gnarled staff wreathed with holly, an elf summons the fury of the storm and calls down explosive bolts of lightning to smite the torch-carrying orcs who threaten her forest.

Crouching out of sight on a high tree branch in the form of a leopard, a human peers out of the jungle at the strange construction of a temple of Evil Elemental Air, keeping a close eye on the cultists’ activities.

Swinging a blade formed of pure fire, a half-elf charges into a mass of skeletal soldiers, sundering the unnatural magic that gives the foul creatures the mocking semblance of life.

Whether calling on the elemental forces of nature or emulating the creatures of the animal world, druids are an embodiment of nature’s resilience, cunning, and fury. They claim no mastery over nature. Instead, they see themselves as extensions of nature’s indomitable will.

Class Features

As a druid, you gain the following class features.

Druid Circle

At 2nd level, you choose to identify with a circle of druids: the Circle of the Land and Circle of the Moon are detailed at the end of the class description or other sources. Your choice grants you features at 2nd level and again at 6th, 10th, and 14th level.

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.

Using the optional feats rule, you can forgo taking this feature to take a feat of your choice instead.

Timeless Body

Starting at 18th level, the primal magic that you wield causes you to age more slowly. For every 10 years that pass, your body ages only 1 year.

Wild Shape Spells

Beginning at 18th level, you can cast many of your druid spells in any shape you assume using Wild Shape. You can perform the somatic and verbal components of a druid spell while in a beast shape, but you aren’t able to provide material components.

Archdruid

At 20th level, you have unlimited uses of Wild Shape. A spell slot expenditure based on the CR of the beast still applies.

Additionally, you can ignore the verbal and somatic components of your druid spells, as well as any material components that lack a cost and aren’t consumed by a spell. You gain this benefit in both your normal shape and your beast shape from Wild Shape.

Circle of the Land

The Circle of the Land is made up of mystics and sages who safeguard ancient knowledge and rites through a vast oral tradition. These druids meet within sacred circles of trees or standing stones to whisper primal secrets in Druidic. The circle’s wisest members preside as the chief priests of communities that hold to the Old Faith and serve as advisors to the rulers of those folk. As a member of this circle, your magic is influenced by the land where you were initiated into the circle’s mysterious rites.

Bonus Cantrip

When you choose this circle at 2nd level, you learn one additional druid cantrip of your choice.

Plant Wildshape

When you use your Wild Shape class feature, you may choose a creature of the plant subtype that you have seen before of the appropriate challenge rating.

Natural Recovery

Starting at 2nd level, you can regain some of your magical energy by sitting in meditation and communing with nature. During a short rest, you choose expended spell slots to recover. The spell slots can have a combined level that is equal to or less than half your druid level (rounded up), and none of the slots can be 6th level or higher. You can’t use this feature again until you finish a long rest.

For example, when you are a 4th-level druid, you can recover up to two levels worth of spell slots. You can recover either a 2nd-level slot or two 1st-level slots.

Circle Spells

Your mystical connection to the land infuses you with the ability to cast certain spells. At 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 9th level you gain access to circle spells connected to the land where you became a druid. Choose that land — arctic, coast, desert, forest, grassland, mountain, swamp, or Underdark — and consult the associated list of spells.

Once you gain access to a circle spell, you always have it prepared, and it doesn’t count against the number of spells you can prepare each day. If you gain access to a spell that doesn’t appear on the druid spell list, the spell is nonetheless a druid spell for you.

Nature’s Stride

Starting at 6th level, you gain the ability to move as if you were a creature of the wild. You gain a climb and swim speed equal to your walking speed, you also gain a burrow speed of 5 feet.

Nature's Bond

At level 6, you gain the ability to bond with a willing tiny beast that is CR 1 or lower, forming a magic, telepathic bond with that willing companion. While your bonded creature is within 100 feet of you, you can communicate with it telepathically.

Additionally, as an action, you can see through it's eyes and hear what it hears until the start of your next turn, gaining the benefits of any special senses that the bonded creature has. During this time, you are deaf and blind with regard to your own senses.

You may only share this bond with one beast at a time.

Nature’s Ward

Starting at 10th level, whenever you cast a druid spell that deals damage, you may add your Wisdom modifier to the damage once.

Nature’s Sanctuary

When you reach 14th level, creatures of the natural world sense your connection to nature and become hesitant to attack you. When a beast or plant creature attacks you, the attack is made with disadvantage, and that creature must make a Wisdom saving throw against your druid spell save DC. On a failed save, the attack automatically misses and the creature is charmed by you until a remove curse spell is cast on it, or one hour has passed. On a successful save, the creature is immune to this effect for 24 hours.

The creature is aware of this effect before it makes its attack against you.

Living Greenery

When you reach 14th level, your mastery of spells that create plants becomes unmatched. When you cast a spell that has a duration of 1 minute and longer that requires your concentration and creates plants, such as entangle and grasping vine, you can use your action to move plants created by the spell up to 30 feet along the ground in a direction of your choice to an area that you can see as long as you concentrate on the spell.

Additionally, you can cast spells as though you were in the space of a plant you created with a spell, but you must use your own senses.

Circle of the Moon

Druids of the Circle of the Moon are fierce guardians of the wilds. Their order gathers under the full moon to share news and trade warnings. They haunt the deepest parts of the wilderness, where they might go for weeks on end before crossing paths with another humanoid creature, let alone another druid.

Changeable as the moon, a druid of this circle might prowl as a great cat one night, soar over the treetops as an eagle the next day, and crash through the undergrowth in bear form to drive off a trespassing monster. The wild is in the druid’s blood.