Gain rocky resilience for your warlock with this petrifying patron.
The gift of stone magic can be a potent one and has tempted those that would seek magic through pacts with powerful stone patron. There are a few potential patrons of such gifts throughout the Eberron setting (and likely beyond) such as the daelkyr Orlassk, the fey King Grayfinger and the medusa Queen Sheska of Cazhaak Draal. Most of these potential patrons are not the most altruistic of individuals though.
If you take this pact, expect a highly resilient warlock with plenty of temporary hit points, the ability to briefly resist a lot of damage and, eventually, command stone servants that obey your commands.
The stone sovereign patron warlock is a 3rd party subclass created by Keith Baker and Visionary Productions and Design for their 3rd party supplement; Frontiers of Eberron: Quickstone. The book was released for D&D 5.5e on D&D Beyond and is also available on DM’s Guild.
At a glance
- Full spellcaster
- High resilience makes it excel as a melee build
- Lots of battlefield control through stone spells
4/5 – A good defensive warlock subclass that can take more of a beating than most warlocks. It also has a strong amount of battlefield control, some great petrifying flavour and a very powerful final feature that allows you to create a continuous supply of stone servants to fight for you and absorb attacks.
Stone Sovereign features
Eternity in stone (Lv3) – 4/5
Turning creatures to stone when you kill them is probably mostly just flavourful until later levels (it may sometimes affect things mechanically). The temporary hit points though are a strong resilience boost. The scaling at higher levels gets considerable eventually too.
Stone speaker (Lv3) – 3/5
Some decent information gathering as stones are all over the place. Your mileage here may depend on the generosity of your DM.
Coming across earth elementals isn’t common, nor is meeting petrified creatures. I’m not sure if the implication here is that creatures petrified by eternity in stone can be communicated with. However, those creatures are at 0HP so also have the unconscious condition so I think rules as written this doesn’t work, though suspect that rules as intended, it perhaps should.
Stone sovereign spells (Lv3) – 4/5
| Ranger level | Prepared spells |
|---|---|
| 3 | Absorb elements, earthbind, earth tremor, spike growth |
| 5 | Magic circle, slow |
| 7 | Stone shape, stoneskin |
| 9 | Bigby’s hand, wall of stone |
Earth tremor, spike growth, slow, Bigby’s hand and wall of stone are all good disruptive spells. You can block paths, slow creatures down or knock them prone. Stone shape has some potential utility (maybe carving through walls in a dungeon) and stoneskin has some decent defence.
Earthbind is a decent foil to flight, but for that reason, can be quite situational. Absorb elements is decent for a defensive spell, but is best on a pact of the blade warlock. Magic circle is really situational though.
Form of stone (Lv6) – 4/5
Petrify yourself for the rest of the round to become quite resilient to damage as you now take on a stone form. Petrification from other sources is rare (and still not wanted as there are many other drawbacks) but this way, you can potentially nullify a lot of damage. That teleportation is useful too making this especially nice for martial builds that get surrounded.
It’s once per rest so you won’t be using this more than once per encounter, but it’s still quite a good defensive feature.
Stone’s embrace (Lv10) – 3/5
I don’t like meld into stone. It’s far too situational and maybe only useful to suddenly become unseen. My main issue is you also don’t know what’s going on outside of the stone. It’s just not that great for a level 3 spell.
With this feature specifically, this is better as you can help the whole party. There’s still an issue here though. If you’re melding into a stone floor, that’s fine, but if melding into a stone wall, there may only be 2 allies you can get within 5ft of you and a stone surface.
The damage resistance is at least quite nice. I guess the idea is to use any spare spell slots before a rest to hide in stone and get a resilience boost while you rest. I guess that’s alright but outside of this, I’d rarely use this spell.
Stone servant (Lv14) – 5/5
Finding petrified creatures is not common. Fortunately, when you kill a creature, its body becomes petrified allowing you to use this feature to transform them into a level 6 earth elemental spirit. That’s a serious companion that requires no concentration and no spell slots. You can only have one at a time, but there’s no limit on uses either so you can keep invoking earth elemental spirits which is a really strong buff.
How good is the stone sovereign subclass?
The stone sovereign patron is a fairly defensive warlock subclass with some strong battlefield control options. By level 14, you’ll also have quite a big meat shield you can invoke too.
Petrifying enemies when they die is a really cool flavour element, but I wish it had more practical applications before level 14. Perhaps the ability to transform them into stone servants earlier, but have them be less powerful (at least initially).
While the stone sovereign works for any warlock build, you’ll get the most out of it from a melee build due to its seriously increased resilience and it’s a good option for exactly this.
4/5
Building a stone sovereign warlock
The stone sovereign is similar in build to other warlocks and really, much of your build depends on the eldritch invocations you take. I’d lean towards a melee build due to the high resilience features you get, but this subclass also works as a pure caster too.
For a full breakdown on how to build a warlock, you can check out my warlock guide. For this article, I’ll just recommend options available from Frontiers of Eberron that work well for a stone sovereign.
Species
Largely you’ll want a species that enhances your resilience and ability to deal damage as well as your spell casting capabilities with the following your best options from Frontiers of Eberron:
- Gargoyle: Some extra resilience is great for a blade build. The unarmored defence could be handy on a dexterity build too as it will exceed the AC from studded leather and means you don’t have to take armor of shadows for a similar armor class.
- Goblin: Some extra damage on some of your attacks. Most creatures will be larger than the small Goblin so this is easy to be applying. Disengage as a bonus action can be useful if you want to use hit and run tactics.
- Harpy: If you want to mix in more spellcasting, then harpies grant some great spells like suggestion and enemies abound. You also get flight which is great.
- Tiefling: Extra spells to play with is handy for a warlock. A damage resistance is also good and there’s more options here too. Sakah is interesting for its advantage on wisdom saving throws against magic and some deception leaning spells. There are some other interesting spells on these lists too like shatter and blindness/deafness.
- Warforged: The Warforged in this book is largely the same as the version in Forge of the Artificer. +1 AC will and poison resilience will help you last even longer. Great if you want even more resilience.
Backgrounds
For a stone sovereign warlock, you’ll want a background that enhances your charisma, dexterity and/or constitution. Below are the backgrounds from Frontiers of Eberron that I think combine great ability scores with good origin feats and skills for a stone sovereign.
| Name | Ability scores | Origin feat | Skill proficiencies | Tool proficiency |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dragonmarked bravo | Strength, dexterity, charisma | Lesser dragonmark | Athletics and intimidation | None |
| Dragonmarked foundling | Dexterity, constitution, charisma | Lesser dragonmark | Insight and stealth | Thieves’ tools |
| Wandslinger | Dexterity, intelligence, charisma | Magic initiate (wizard) | Intimidation and sleight of hand | One kind of gambling set or woodcarver’s tools |
Feats
- Hewn for battle: If you’re a Gargoyle and you want to invest less in dexterity, then you could pick this up for some quite good AC which is handy if you maybe want more feats than ability score increases (or just better AC with a high dexterity).
- Lesser dragonmark: Not all of these are going to be great on a warlock, but some grant great spells and handy skill improvements. I’d probably suggest the lesser dragonmarks of passage (for misty step and longstrider, orient step can help with hit and run tactics too), sentinel (for perception proficiency and shield) and shadow (for stealth proficiency, darkness and some illusions).
- Orb expert: Some improved attacks/spellcasting and improved evasiveness are excellent for a warlock. Especially a blade build.
- Shadow’s gift of stone: Quite a few extra spell castings as you progress in levels is going to be very useful for a warlock who can be light on spell slots.
- Staff expert: Warlocks can make a lot of ranged spell attacks, particularly through eldritch blast (which a lot of warlocks can use regularly). This will mean you have potential to reroll poor damage rolls more than most and can benefit more often from knocking prone too.
- Voice of the fury: Similar to shadow’s gift of stone, this gives you a bunch of free spell castings each long rest which is useful for the low spell slot warlock.
- Wings of stone: Flight is always useful. If you want that and are a gargoyle, then this could be handy.
More from Eberron
There are several 1st and 3rd party releases dedicated to Eberron, including Keith Baker’s Exploring Eberron and Frontiers of Eberron and the 1st party Forge of the Artificer. Check out all our coverage on these releases.
