D&D Beyond 3rd Party Spotlight: The Illrigger

With all the new 3rd party content appearing on D&D Beyond and knowing some of the site’s quirks, I wanted to look at some of that content to see how well it’s been implemented. The first 3rd party product I’m looking at is the Illrigger. Because some companies have sold piecemeal items on the site, I wanted to clarify this is the whole Illrigger supplement produced by MCDM. That includes the following:

• The Illrigger class
• Five subclasses
• Six Combat Masteries (basically alternate Fighting Styles)
• Eight new spells
• Five NPC stat blocks for Retainer characters
• Two Magic Items

The Illrigger supplement, including the introduction and the accompanying fiction, appears in D&D Beyond. All the material above is covered precisely as it was in the supplement but formatted for electronic display. That’s how the material in the Illrigger works in the Sources section of the site. Let’s look at the other integrations.

Character Creation

Illrigger appears in the character builder options as long as Partnered Content and MCDM are checked. I created an Illrigger with all 18 stats at 20th level to see how the class abilities and the subclasses were implemented.

The base features all display correctly. There are boxes to check the number of seals you have and a counter to track for your Infernal Conduit Dice once you have that feature. The features set up to reset on a short rest reset on a short rest, and the ones that reset on a long rest reset on a long rest.

Only two of your Combat Mastery abilities would reflect as passive boosts on your character sheet. Bravado changes your unarmed armor class as expected when it is chosen. Lies allows you to pick one type of weapon and use your Charisma bonus to attack instead of Strength or Dexterity. There is no option to select that weapon or a way to display what your Charisma-based attack will look like.

If you multiclass into Illrigger, D&D Beyond shows the proper proficiencies granted by taking a level of the class. The subclasses have varying degrees of implementation. None of the subclasses with a once-per-long or short rest ability get the single check box that other rules and elements that function similarly have. The Architect of Ruin’s spellcasting works fine, similar to the Eldritch Knight or the Arcane Trickster. Other than its once-per-rest abilities, the Hellspeaker gets checkboxes for its two abilities with multiple uses. Neither the Painkiller nor the Sanguine Knight have check boxes for their multiple-use abilities. All subclasses have text on the character sheet indicating the correct number of uses; there is just nothing to track it with.

Spells

Other classes can also use several of the Illrigger spells. The spells will appear if you search for them in the Spells section of the Game Rules. Unfortunately, the spells only show up in the spell lists for the 2024 version of the classes that gain those spells. If you’re using a 2014 class, the spells aren’t available.

Magic Items

There are two magic items included in the supplement. One magic item is a “template” magic item that can be applied to any weapon, and D&D Beyond treats this like it does any other special weapon property. The potion will also appear if you search for it under Magic Items.

Monsters

Each of the five retainers has a stat block in the Source section of D&D Beyond, but there are no entries for them in the Monsters section if you search for them. This is the same issue that Flee Mortals! has, where none of the Retainers or Companion Creatures appear in the Monsters section, only in the Source section of the complete book.

Final Thoughts

I picked this up mainly to see how D&D Beyond would handle some of the third-party content that WotC seems eager to offer through the service. I know that D&D Beyond can be a little rigid in how it expects rules to work, and even the 2024 rules seemed to be a challenge for the site in some areas.

I usually don’t bring price up except in extreme circumstances, but I think it’s fair to point out that the Illrigger costs $14.99 on both D&D Beyond and Roll20. Although Roll20 has implemented the Retainers from Flee Mortals!, the Retainers from the Illrigger are not available to use from the monster section of the site, either. Roll20 only has the Illrigger spells in the Illrigger’s spell list, although you could drag and drop the spell into a character sheet to make it available, but that’s not an ideal solution. The lesson here is that no electronic solution has fully implemented the content in the book.

Given that they cost the same amount, I don’t want to cut Roll20 more slack than D&D Beyond, but it does feel like part of the appeal of D&D Beyond is that it’s the official source for all things D&D, but in reaching out for 3rd party content, D&D Beyond may not be flexible enough to meet the demands of the material they are presenting. The Illrigger isn’t that strange compared to other classes. It has no twists and turns that deviate from the 5e SRD norm. But it still has some bumps in the road for its implementation. We’ll be looking at something else that does stretch D&D Beyond’s assumptions a bit more soon.

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• The Illrigger Revised – MCDM Productions | DriveThruRPG
• MCDM 5e Class [BUNDLE]