Wield the oft-maligned bone magic and gain defensive and domineering powers.
Osteomancy is a magical discipline that is little understood and often feared. The manipulation of bone not only allows osteomancers to inflict serious damage on their enemies, but can also grant them control over the skeletons of their targets. Such capabilities are frightening. Yet with this comes the power to damage, dominate and defend meaning an Osteomancer can make a great ally.
If you play an Osteomancer, expect a tough (for a wizard) subclass that will want to take control of powerful enemies and control their attacks. Actual osteomancy spells aren’t a must as it happens, but you may want them for the flavour anyway.
Steinhardt’s Guide to the Eldritch Hunt is a 3rd party book released for D&D 5e and 5.5e. A part of the book was recently launched on D&D Beyond as a player pack. You can also grab the full supplement from MonkeyDM’s website. This guide tackles the 5.5e version of the osteomancer wizard.
At a glance
- Full Spellcaster with a wide range of spells
- Become more resilient with skeletal protection
- Take control of the bodies of your enemies to place them under your control
5/5 – Osteomancers are capable of being exceptionally tough to hit and far more resilient than other wizards. Not only that, but they can take control of the bones of other creatures allowing them to control their actions as a puppeteer might their puppet. These features make them very dangerous and a top tier wizard subclass.
Osteomancer features
Brittle bone armor (Lv3) – 5/5
As mentioned in the feature, this does not stack with armor or shields, but mage armor is not actually armor and this feature doesn’t change your base AC (like mage armor does) it grants a boost to your AC. This means that the osteomancer can be very well armored. Mage armor lasts 8hrs and this lasts 1hr making it easy enough to combine ahead of combat.
If you can get to 20 dexterity, then that’s 18Ac with mage armor and activating this will get your AC to between 20 and 24 making you a very tough wizard to hit.
At lower levels, this certainly won’t be so high, but you might easily be looking at 17 or 18AC at level 3. You can’t have this active all the time, but at a cost of a level 2 spell, will always be worth it ahead of major encounters.
The extra temporary hit points and resistances are fairly substantial resilience bonuses too. The only challenge is making sure you’re prepared ahead of combat as the action to setup can be substantial for that first round of combat. If you desperately need a protective boost though, it’s still worth the action required.
Anatomical expert (Lv3) – 2/5
Medicine isn’t the greatest of skills. It’s most important moments involve stabilising, but doing so using your medicine proficiency is generally inferior to just casting healing word or using a potion. Obviously, wizards don’t have healing word on their spell list, but usually, someone in the party should. Using intelligence for medicine and survival checks allows you to be good at these, but again, both of these skills are usually less important.
For many creatures though, these skill checks will be made with expertise. As most creatures have skeletons, this may be quite often, though don’t expect it to help when dealing with plants.
Bone puppetry (Lv6) – 5/5
Commanding another creature for a turn is really good as it lets you use their actions in the way you want, doesn’t require concentration and nullifies them for the round. There are drawbacks though. It will consume your own actions and the actions you’re using for the creature will be less likely to succeed (disadvantage on attacks and advantage for allies’ saving throws).
Despite this, I think it’s well worth using, especially against low strength enemies (like spellcasters). You also have control of their reaction too (at least until the end of their next turn). This will allow allies to safely move out of reach of the creature and let them make opportunity attacks (or even cast something like counterspell).
Skeletal mastery (Lv10) – 3/5
Alter self is an alright spell. Doing so without concentration likely isn’t a big deal as it tends to be more for out of combat needs. Especially as natural weapons is basically useless for a wizard (you shouldn’t be bothering to make unarmed strikes). Disguises are more useful and I can see this being the main use for this spell.
Becoming boneless is another that’s more of a utility feature than a combat one. It makes you someone that can maybe sneak around places a little more by sliding under doors, between bars or through crevices in the wall.
Improved bone puppetry (Lv14) – 5/5
Bone puppetry was already really good and now it’s even better. This removes the drawbacks, makes it last a minute and gives an option to cause disadvantage on the saving throw against it. It will consume your concentration though.
Make sure you target powerful creatures that are worthwhile controlling with a preference for low strength creatures and be prepared with plenty of non-concentration spells (which you should have anyway). Be aware though that the most powerful creatures will have legendary resistance, but this could be a way to whittle that down.
How good is the Osteomancer subclass?
Between some serious resilience and the ability to control the actions of enemies, the Osteomancer is really good! But not so good as to be broken. I’d allow this subclass at my table.
As it happens, there’s nothing here that encourages taking plenty of osteomancy spells (like an osteomancy savant feature) but you can take these spells anyway. It also has a couple of utility features that are only OK. But the other features are so excellent that this subclass instantly becomes a very potent option for a wizard.
5/5
Building an Osteomancer wizard
Like most wizards, osteomancers primarily want to be on the back lines casting plenty of spells (and controlling their enemies’ actions). This means applying similar approaches to your build as with other wizard subclasses.
As this is a Steinhardt’s Guide subclass, I’ve just looked at character options in Steinhardt’s Guide to the Eldritch Hunt book in my build advice below and shared which work well for this wizard subclass. If you want a full breakdown on how to do this using D&D 2024 character options, you can check out my wizard optimisation guide.
If you need some help picking your spells, you can also check out my wizard spell guide as well as my guide to the spells from Steinhardt’s Guide.
Species/race
Wizards can benefit from a few aspects of a species. Innate spellcasting is always useful for a wizard, as is some extra resilience.
- Cursed blood: A climb speed can be useful (especially while sneaking around in a boneless or disguised form) and if you take watchful twin, you can grab a few useful spells to add to your repertoire and will get repeat castings of these. Improved initiative will be good for blasting spells earlier in combat before martials get in the way.
- Manikin: Lightning resistance for some extra resilience. If you don’t plan on using mage armor, integrated gold plating will give you a slight AC boost. You’ll need to take the infiltrator option as the others won’t work with your lack of armor proficiency or your brittle bone armor. For your service model, it’s not ideal for a wizard, but thespian will potentially let you move further on a turn which can be helpful.
Backgrounds
For the osteomancer, you’ll want to prioritise ability score increases for intelligence, dexterity and constitution first and foremost. You may also want to grab some knowledge skills as the most intellectual member of the party.
| Name | Ability scores | Origin feat | Skill proficiencies | Tool proficiency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amnesiac | Constitution, intelligence, wisdom | Curious | Insight and investigation | One kind of artisan’s tools |
| Investigator | Dexterity, intelligence, wisdom | Curious | Insight and investigation | One kind of artisan’s tools |
| Scion | Strength, dexterity, intelligence | Curious | Arcana and investigation | Tinker’s tools and one kind of artisan’s tools |
Feats
The following are all good feats for an osteomancer:
- Curious: Can temporarily gain proficiency in a skill you don’t already have this for. This is especially useful as you gain some utility traits and may find yourself dealing with less common skills for a wizard like stealth or deception. Learning resistances, vulnerabilities and immunities of enemies can be handy in combat too so you can select the right spells.
- Faithful: Charmed and frightened resilience plus you get heroic inspiration when you roll a 1 on a d20 test. This isn’t the best for a wizard as they don’t tend to make as many d20 tests as others, but it’s still alright and probably your next best origin feat from Steinhardt’s Guide so it’s an OK option.
- Osteomantic adept: Osteomancers don’t necessarily get more or better osteomancy spells than any other wizard, but you can certainly choose them, especially if you’re playing an Osteomancer anyway. This gives the option of more powerful osteomancy spells which is quite useful and your regular temporary hit points make the damage less of a problem.
Weapons
Wizards shouldn’t usually be using weapons, and certainly not an osteomancer. There’s a case for a backup weapon in case you can’t cast spells for some reason, but that will be rare and none of the weapons from Steinhardt’s Guide are a good fit even then. Grab a dagger and maybe a light crossbow just in case.
More from Steinhardt’s Guide
Interested in what else is available from Steinhardt’s Guide to the Eldritch Hunt? Why not check out some of our other guides?
