Hello, everyone, and Merry Christmas for those who celebrate it! Today’s article is a new subclass, the Oath of the Junker. The intent for the subclass is for it to be exclusive to goblin paladins, but should you be so moved to use it with another character concept, it’s certainly within your GM’s prerogative to allow you to use it.
Paladin Oath
Oath of the Junker
Living on the fringes of what most would consider civilized life, goblins are offered very little willingly – they must scrounge and scrape for even small amounts of material wealth. Goblins particularly blessed by ambition may take the Oath of the Junker, utilizing every scrap of material they can find. To the untrained eye, they may appear to be ravenous, garbage-dwelling hoarders, but Junkers have a precise use for each piece of refuse that they have collected. These goblins may find themselves roles as resourceful quartermasters, innovative smiths, or even as creative assassins for hire.
Restriction: Goblins Only
Only goblins may take the Oath of the Junker because of facilitating factors in their scavenging society and culture.
Your GM can lift this restriction to better suit a campaign – the restriction exists under the assumption of conventional setting roles for goblins, which might not apply to your campaign’s setting, or your character’s attitudes may reflect the attitudes of the Oath of the Junker despite being a non-goblin.
Tenets of the Junker
The tenets of the Oath of the Junker are less a strict set of rules, and more a common thread of attitudes shared by the goblins who take the mantle. Like the beliefs it embodies, this oath wastes no time in the minutiae of its doctrine.
Waste Nothing. When offered little in life, there is nothing to be wasted. Decadence is a repulsive trait to a Junker, and abandoning anything, be it resources, opportunities, or people, is antithetical to what few morals the oath teaches. However, which of these three a Junker will prioritize may vary from one to another.
Oath Spells
You gain oath spells at the paladin levels listed.
| Paladin Level | Spells |
| 3rd | grease, shield |
| 5th | heat metal, pass without trace |
| 9th | nondetection, stinking cloud |
| 13th | confusion, greater invisibility |
| 17th | animate objects, reincarnate |
Channel Divinity
When you take this oath at 3rd level, you gain the following two Channel Divinity options.
Waste Not, Want Not. By spending 10 minutes with a pile of scrap material, you can craft a makeshift piece of equipment, imbued with trace amounts of divine magic. You may create a +1 magical weapon, shield, or suit of armor.
Being constructed from low-quality scraps, this equipment falls apart after an hour.
Recycled Magic. As a reaction, when all creatures targeted by a spell you cast succeed on a saving throw, you may regain the spell slot you used to cast that spell.
Aura of Rust
Starting at 7th level, you exude an aura of oxidation, eroding even the most refined of equipment. Hostile creatures within 10 feet of you have a penalty to weapon attack rolls and AC equal to your Constitution modifier.
At 18th level, the range of this aura increases to 30 feet.
Eye for Quality
Beginning at 15th level, you can quickly appraise the durability of scrap materials. The equipment you produce with Waste Not, Want Not lasts for up to four hours.
Avatar of Scrap
Starting at 20th level, you gain the ability to transform into the ideal representation of the Junker’s values. As an action, you magically gather loose materials around you, which coalesce into a formidable extension of your body. For the next 1 minute, you gain the following benefits:
Your size becomes Huge. With this, your melee weapon attacks have a reach of 15 feet.
When you hit a creature with a melee weapon attack, they must succeed on a Dexterity saving throw equal to your spell save DC or be restrained for the duration of your transformation. While restrained in this way, a creature takes 3d8 poison damage at the start of each of its turns. A creature may repeat this saving throw at the end of each of their turns.
You gain resistance to all damage types except for psychic. If you already had resistance to a damage type, you instead gain immunity to that damage type.
Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you complete a long rest.
This is neat!