The Hearthwarden

Plays like: the Druid — the Growing’s healer and green-caller; shapeshifting belongs to no mortal Calling, but the field will fight for you.

The Hearthwarden is the healer who has traded a piece of themselves for every wound they’ve closed. They hold a Reaching into the Growing — green Chaos-fire that mends flesh, coaxes seed into stalk, and knits a dying soldier back onto their feet — but every Working drawn from that well leaves a residue on the caster’s own spirit. Hearthwardens are midwives, medics, grove-priests, and battlefield menders who have learned that life poured out does not return; it only moves from one vessel to another, and they are always the source.

“You ask if it hurts to heal you. It doesn’t hurt. It just costs. There’s a difference, and I stopped explaining it years ago.” — Ossa Ferrn, Hearthwarden of the Ashgate Commune

Quick Build & Core Stats

Quick Build: High Wisdom, then Constitution, then Strength or Dexterity depending on whether you favor the Grove or the Ward. Choose the Herbalism Kit and a shield.

• Hit Die: d8
• Primary Ability: Wisdom
• Saving Throw Proficiencies: Wisdom, Constitution
• Armor: Light armor, medium armor, shields
• Weapons: Simple weapons, plus the scythe, sickle, and spear
• Tools: Herbalism kit; choose one of Poisoner’s Kit or Medicine (as a tool proficiency variant your DM allows)
• Skills: Choose two from Animal Handling, Insight, Medicine, Nature, Persuasion, Religion, Survival
• Starting Equipment: (a) a sickle or (b) a spear; leather armor or scale mail; a shield; an herbalism kit; a healer’s satchel (functions as a component pouch for Growing Workings); a traveler’s clothes and a seedpod holy symbol of your Covenant

Level Progression

Level	Proficiency Bonus	Features	Vitality Dice	Max Working Tier
1	+2	Reaching: The Growing, Vitality Dice, Green Sight	2d6	1
2	+2	Field Dressing	3d6	1
3	+2	Covenant (Path)	3d6	2
4	+2	Ability Score Improvement	4d6	2
5	+3	Deepening Roots, Warden’s Ground	4d8	3
6	+3	Covenant feature, Rootgrown	5d8	3
7	+3	Weathering	5d8	3
8	+3	Ability Score Improvement	6d8	4
9	+4	Kindred Bloom	6d8	4
10	+4	Covenant feature	7d8	4
11	+4	Unbroken Vine	7d10	5
12	+4	Ability Score Improvement	8d10	5
13	+5	Weight of Seasons	8d10	5
14	+5	Covenant capstone	9d10	5
15	+5	Long Root	9d10	6
16	+5	Ability Score Improvement	10d10	6
17	+6	Evergreen Vessel	10d12	6
18	+6	Fray-Warded Heart	11d12	6
19	+6	Ability Score Improvement	11d12	6
20	+6	The Undying Grove	12d12	6

Class Features

Reaching: The Growing

You hold a Reaching into the Growing, the Chaos discipline of life, healing, and verdant change. You can attempt Workings up to your Max Working Tier (above), spending Fray per the standard magic system. Your eyes flash deep green on every cast — an absorbing, matte green, as Chaos colors do — and enemies who witness it gain advantage on Insight checks to read your intent. Before adding a Working’s Tier to your Fray, roll your Faith Die (set by your Conviction) and subtract it, minimum add 1; roll twice and take the higher if the cast is dead-center of your Tenet. At 75% of your Fray cap, casting triggers a d6 against your Loss Menu; at cap, you Overchannel or you stop. Fray never clears on a short rest — only a long rest of true stillness heals half.

Growing Workings run from minor (spurring a seed to sprout, closing a shallow cut, calming a spooked animal) at low Tiers to profound restoration and communion with living systems at high Tiers — reknitting shattered bone, growing a shelter of living wood in a minute, or speaking briefly with the spirit of a dying grove.

When a Green Working calls for a saving throw, the DC is 8 + your proficiency bonus + your Wisdom modifier.

Green Workings — the Field Menu

The Growing heals, but it also fights. The following Workings are the codified battlefield craft of the Calling — no negotiation needed at the table; if you can reach the Tier, you can attempt the Working, and the standard economy applies in full (roll your Faith Die, add the remainder to your Fray). Each needs living soil, rootstock, or the seedstock in your healer’s satchel within reach of the effect — a Hearthwarden carries seeds the way an archer carries arrows. Unless noted, an effect persists for 10 minutes or until you dismiss it (no action), then slumps back into ordinary green.

• Tier 1 — Grasping Roots. Roots and runners erupt across a 10-foot square you can see within 60 feet. Each creature in the square makes a Strength save or is restrained; a restrained creature or one adjacent to it can use an action to tear it free (Strength/Athletics vs. your DC). The roots hold for 1 minute.
• Tier 2 — Creeping Vines. A 20-foot-radius patch of ground within 60 feet crawls with clutching vine. The area is difficult terrain for creatures you choose when you cast.
• Tier 3 — Bramble Wall. A wall of woven thorn rises along a line up to 40 feet long, 10 feet high, and 5 feet thick, within 60 feet. It blocks line of sight, grants three-quarters cover to creatures behind it, and a creature moving through it takes 2d8 piercing damage and treats it as difficult terrain.
• Tier 4 — Spike Ground. The earth in a 20-foot radius within 90 feet sprouts hardened thorn-spikes, indistinguishable from natural growth to any creature that didn’t watch you cast. A creature moving through the area takes 2d4 piercing damage for every 5 feet it moves, and the area is difficult terrain.
• Tier 5 — Wake the Grove (Lesser). Every mundane plant in a 40-foot radius within 90 feet turns hostile at once. Each creature of your choice in the area makes a Strength save or is restrained, repeating the save at the end of its turns; the whole area is difficult terrain for 1 minute.
• Tier 6 — Wake the Grove. You rouse one Huge or smaller tree within 60 feet into a walking guardian for 1 hour (use awakened-tree statistics; it acts on your initiative and obeys your spoken wishes) — or cast the Lesser working across a 90-foot radius. When the hour ends, the tree roots itself wherever it stands, and it remembers you.

These are Workings, not techniques — every one of them shows in your eyes, and every one of them goes on the ledger.

Vitality Dice

You carry a pool of Vitality Dice, shown on the table, that represents life you can lend without drawing on the Growing’s Fray cost — this is disciplined technique, not raw Working-craft, so it is Fray-free on its own. Your pool refreshes fully on a short or long rest. As an action or bonus action, touching a creature (including yourself), you may spend any number of Vitality Dice at once for one of the following:

• Mend the Wound: the target regains HP equal to the dice rolled + your Wisdom modifier.
• Sustaining Touch (reaction): when a creature within 30 feet drops to 0 HP, spend 2 dice to stabilize them and heal them for the dice rolled.
• Root the Spirit: target gains temporary HP equal to the roll, lasting 1 minute.
• Share the Burden: spend 1 die to remove one level of exhaustion from yourself or a creature you touch (usable once per rest per creature).
• Quicken Growth: spend 1 die to add the roll to a saving throw a creature you touch is about to make.

Bloodless Mercy

Vitality Dice feel free. They are not. The third time since your last long rest that you use Vitality Dice to heal a creature other than yourself, and every time thereafter, you gain 1 Fray. This is the Growing pulling on you sideways — every gift given outward wears a groove in your own spirit, whether or not you spent a Working to give it. This is the core tax of the class: it makes generosity a resource, not a reflex.

Green Sight

You can see the rough life-force of any creature or plant within 30 feet as a faint green shimmer — you always know a creature’s approximate HP percentage (healthy / wounded / bloodied / dying) and whether a plant is alive, diseased, or dead, without a check.

Field Dressing 2nd level

During a short rest, you may spend 1 Vitality Die per creature (including yourself) to add its roll to the HP that creature regains from spending its own Hit Dice that rest.

Deepening Roots 5th level

You gain resistance to poison damage and advantage on saves against being poisoned or diseased — your body has begun to grow a little stubborn about staying whole.

Warden’s Ground 5th level

The field has learned your name. Once per short rest, you may cast one Green Working of Tier 2 or lower from the Field Menu without adding any Fray — the ground answers before you finish asking, the way a dog rises when its keeper stands. Your eyes still flash, and the Working still needs its soil or seedstock; only the ledger stays quiet.

Rootgrown 6th level

The Growing no longer just moves through you — it has taken up residence. At the end of each long rest, choose one minor graft; it is Fray-free, always on, and unmistakably green (moss at your collar, seed-burrs in your hair, a thumbnail gone the color of new leaves):

• Barkgrip: ivy threads your palms and soles — you have advantage on Strength (Athletics) checks to climb, and on checks to grapple or keep hold of a creature or object.
• Thornhide: briar laces your skin — a creature that grapples you, or hits you with an unarmed strike, takes 1d4 piercing damage.
• Verdant Breath: green threads your lungs — you can subsist on sunlight and water alone, and you have advantage on Constitution saves against inhaled poisons and gases.

Grove Covenant Hearthwardens note: Wild Grafting is the combat-grade cousin of this feature, and the two stack.

Weathering 7th level

Your Fray cap increases by 2, and whenever you roll on your Loss Menu, you may reroll once and take either result.

Kindred Bloom 9th level

Once per long rest, you may cast a non-healing Growing Working of Tier 3 or lower — a sprout, a calming, a communion, a warding of the land — without adding any Fray; the cost is instead paid by the land or by willing bystanders (narrate accordingly: flowers wilt in a 10-foot radius, nearby animals grow briefly lethargic, etc.). Kindred Bloom cannot be used to restore hit points: the mercy of others’ pain never comes free, and any healing you do still runs through Bloodless Mercy below.

Unbroken Vine 11th level

Your Mend the Wound range extends to 30 feet (no touch required), and when you use Sustaining Touch, the stabilized creature also regains HP equal to your Wisdom modifier even before dice are spent.

Weight of Seasons 13th level

Once per long rest, when you would gain Fray from Bloodless Mercy, you can instead mark it as debt — delay it to the end of the encounter — allowing you to keep healing at full effectiveness through a crisis before the cost lands all at once.

Long Root 15th level

Your Max Working Tier reaches 6. Once per long rest, when you Overchannel on a Growing Working, you may choose to take the exhaustion-equivalent Chaos cost (name a small permanent loss) as a temporary loss instead — it fades on your next long rest of true stillness rather than being permanent. This does not apply to losses taken while at the Break.

Evergreen Vessel 17th level

Your Vitality Dice become d12s. Additionally, once per long rest you may spend a bonus action to regain 2d12 Vitality Dice mid-combat, as your body pulls reserves from nowhere it should.

Fray-Warded Heart 18th level

When you would hit your Fray cap, you may choose to reduce the incoming Fray by half (round down) once per long rest — your identity, thinned as it is, has learned to bend without snapping quite so easily.

The Undying Grove (20th level, Capstone)

Once per long rest, as an action, you become a conduit for the Growing itself. Every creature of your choice within 60 feet regains HP equal to 8d10 + your Wisdom modifier, and each creature below half HP has one exhaustion level removed. You then gain 6 Fray — the price of an Overchannelled Tier-6 Working, the deepest a mortal Reaching goes — and if that would carry you past your cap, you Overchannel it (naming your permanent loss) rather than being able to refuse. This is the closest a Hearthwarden comes to the legendary tiers, and it costs like it.

The Covenants

A Hearthwarden swears one of four open Covenants at 3rd level. A fifth exists that is not taught in any hall and is not chosen so much as fallen into — the Winter Covenant, the Growing turned inward. It is written here because a player or a Master may need it, but understand what it is: the one Covenant that walks the Hollow’s near edge by design, and the one no hall will admit to teaching.

The Hearth Covenant

You tend people — a village, a company, a family of strangers who became kin.

• 3rd — Keeper of the Threshold: You bind a chosen community, camp, or party as your Hearth. While within it, once per long rest you may cast a Growing cantrip-tier effect as a ritual (no Fray cost) to aid the group — purify a well, calm a crowd, ease a fever. Gain proficiency in Persuasion or Insight if you don’t have it.
• 6th — Many Hands: When you use Vitality Dice to heal a creature, a second creature within 10 feet of the target may immediately spend one of its own Hit Dice, adding your Wisdom modifier to the roll.
• 10th — Unyielding Welcome: Once per long rest, you can grant every creature in your Hearth (up to your Wisdom modifier in number) temporary HP equal to your Hearthwarden level during a rest, and remove one shared exhaustion level from the group.
• 14th — The Hearth Endures: At the end of each long rest, name up to your Wisdom modifier creatures as your hearth-circle — the intimate few you would burn years for, a tie deeper than the wider Hearth. Two graces flow down that bond. Concentrated Tending: whenever you spend Vitality Dice to heal a member of your hearth-circle, each die counts as its maximum value rather than being rolled, and that creature also gains temporary HP equal to your Wisdom modifier — what you ration to a crowd, you give your own in full. The Bond Pulls: you always know the instant a hearth-circle member drops to 0 HP, at any distance in the world. Once per long rest, when this happens, you may answer it — as a reaction if they are within 60 feet of you, or as an action on your next turn no matter how far apart you stand — and pour yourself down the bond: they are stabilized and regain 4d10 + your Wisdom modifier hit points. This costs no Vitality Dice — the Hearth never spends its dice on its own — but you immediately gain 2 Fray, because the life comes out of you. Where the Ward throws its arms around a whole line, the Hearth reaches across the world for one bonded soul.

The Grove Covenant

You tend wild land and the creatures on it, and it has started tending you back.

• 3rd — Bonded Bloom: You grow a Verdant Companion (a Tiny beast or plant-spirit, use the Find Familiar-style statistics your DM provides) that can deliver a touch-range Vitality Dice heal on your behalf as a bonus action.
• 6th — Wild Grafting: As a bonus action, spend 1 Vitality Die to grow claws, thorns, or keen senses for 1 minute — gain a natural weapon (1d6 + Str/Dex, your choice) or advantage on Wisdom (Perception) checks relying on smell or hearing.
• 10th — Thicket Sanctuary: Once per short rest, as an action, grow a 20-foot-radius patch of dense bramble and canopy. It grants three-quarters cover to those inside, and any creature that ends its turn there regains 1d8 HP.
• 14th — One With the Green: Once per long rest, root yourself for 1 round as a reaction, gaining resistance to all damage; or your Verdant Companion permanently gains a second, more powerful form (DM’s discretion) as the grove itself invests in it.

The Ward Covenant

You tend the line — the shield-wall that keeps everyone else alive long enough to matter.

• 3rd — Battlefield Bloom: When you use Mend the Wound in combat, the target also gains temporary HP equal to your Wisdom modifier. You gain proficiency with martial melee weapons that lack the heavy property.
• 6th — Thorned Aegis (reaction): When a creature within 10 feet of you is hit by an attack, spend 1 Vitality Die to reduce the damage by the roll + your Wisdom modifier, and the attacker takes the same amount of piercing damage from lashing thorns.
• 10th — Stand Fast: Allies within 10 feet of you add your proficiency bonus to death saving throws. Once per short rest, you may spend 1 Vitality Die as a reaction to auto-stabilize a dying creature within 30 feet.
• 14th — Bulwark of Green: Once per long rest, as a reaction, spend 3 Vitality Dice: you and all allies within 10 feet gain resistance to all damage until the start of your next turn. You automatically gain 1 Fray — holding a line this hard always costs something of you.

The Greentide Covenant

You bind no single hearth and no one grove, but a whole living country — a biome, a watershed, a turning season — and when you call, the ground itself rises to answer. Where the Ward holds a line and the Hearth holds a few, the Greentide Warden holds the land for a mile in every direction: terrain-shaper, season-caller, the green tide given a face. Yours is the Covenant of casters — you shape the field, never your own flesh, for shapeshifting belongs to no mortal Calling, and the tide makes ground of you, not a beast.

• 3rd — Bound to the Biome: You swear yourself not to a hearth or a grove but to a whole living country you have walked long enough to carry in your bones. At the end of each long rest, choose one bound biome — arctic, coast, desert, forest, grassland, marsh, mountain, or underdark — to reflect the ground beneath you or the country your heart is rooted in. Two graces follow. First, the field flavors itself to you: every Green Working you cast from the Field Menu takes on your bound biome’s character (a forest Bramble Wall is woven blackthorn; a coastal one, a reef of razor kelp and barnacle; a desert Spike Ground, a bed of cactus-spine), and while you stand on natural ground of that biome each Field Menu Working costs 1 less Fray, to a minimum of the +1 the ledger always claims — on home ground the land does half the reaching for you. Second, breadth comes cheap: once per short rest, while you stand on any natural, growing ground, you may cast a single Field Menu Working of Tier 3 or lower (and no higher than your Max Working Tier) without adding any Fray. This grace is separate from Warden’s Ground, and a Greentide Warden standing on living soil may spend both in the same rest. You shape the land, never your own flesh — the green tide makes ground of you, not a beast.
• 6th — Warden’s Stride: The green has stopped tripping you and started tripping for you. You are never slowed by difficult terrain made of or choked with plants, and you take no damage and suffer no effect from your own Field Menu hazards — you walk through your own Bramble Wall or Spike Ground untouched — and up to your Wisdom modifier allies share this grace so long as they stay within 30 feet of you. In addition, as a bonus action and without adding any Fray, you may rouse the plants — or the seedstock from your satchel — in a 15-foot radius within 60 feet into clutching motion: that area becomes difficult terrain for creatures of your choice for 1 minute, or until you rouse another patch. This is a minor stirring, not a Working; your eyes still flash their deep, matte, light-drinking green, but the ledger stays quiet. It stacks freely with your Rootgrown graft and with anything the Field Menu lays down.
• 10th — Green Tide: Once per long rest, as an action, you call the tide of your bound biome up out of the ground. For 1 minute, while you hold concentration as on a Working, living growth surges across a 60-foot radius centered on you and travels with you as you move. Within it: the whole area is difficult terrain for your enemies, while you and allies you choose pass freely as the growth leans aside; any enemy that starts its turn in the area makes a Strength saving throw against your Green Working DC (8 + your proficiency bonus + your Wisdom modifier) or has its speed reduced to 0 until the start of its next turn, snared in the green; clutching cover rises where your allies stand, granting each of them half cover; and at the start of each of your turns the field feeds its own — one creature of your choice within the area regains 1d8 + your Wisdom modifier hit points, the regrowth of the field made literal. When the minute ends or you let the tide fall, you gain 2 Fray, for a summons this wide still crosses your ledger even on home ground. You are calling the land, not wearing it.
• 14th — The Turning Season: The land has learned to wear you like weather. Two graces answer. First, a standing grace: while you stand on natural, growing ground, at the start of each of your turns you regain hit points equal to your Wisdom modifier, and the ground within 5 feet of you stays quietly overgrown — difficult terrain for your enemies, never for you or your allies. You are never again standing on neutral ground. Second, once per long rest, as an action and requiring no concentration, you call a season over the country around you — a stretch up to a half-mile across in the open, or one whole building or clearing you can see. Name spring, summer, autumn, or winter in your bound biome’s character; the season holds for 1 hour, and you choose its temper as you call it:
• The Green Answers (a boon): the called land is difficult terrain for your enemies but open road for you and your allies; any ally who finishes a short rest within it regains all expended Vitality Dice and sheds one level of exhaustion; and any ally reduced to 0 HP within it is automatically stabilized as the ground cradles them.
• The Land Refuses (a bane): enemies within the called land treat the whole area as difficult terrain and have disadvantage on ranged attack rolls as risen growth, driven snow, or summer haze fouls their aim; and each enemy that starts its turn more than 30 feet from you makes a Strength saving throw against your Green Working DC or cannot take the Dash action until the start of its next turn, the country closing around it like a slow fist.

Calling the season adds 3 Fray — the price of turning a whole land, paid on your own ledger as everything is. You do not become the biome; you command it, and it remembers your face long after you have gone.

The Winter Covenant (the shadowed Covenant)

You turned the Growing inward, onto your own flesh, and learned the thing no Hearthwarden is supposed to learn: that you can buy years by burning them. The Growing is meant to point outward, at a field or a wound or a village. Turned inward it renews you, cell by cell, and the ledger for that renewal is real — a year bought is a year burned. It balances only one way, by letting the burned year drift off you and onto the world. Every Warden who has ever held a hearth has felt the pull of this. Almost all of them refuse it. The few who do not learn to wear a warmer Covenant over it like a coat, and to keep moving before anyone counts the wilting.

Mechanically, the Winter Covenant is a Hollow-adjacency feature line: every one of its powers is a documented tell to anyone reading you with the Knowing, with true seeing, or with a Binding circle. Take it knowing that. A Master should treat a Winter-Covenant Warden the way the world treats one — as something that is technically still alive, still kind at the surface, and slowly wrong underneath.

• 3rd — The Growing, Turned Inward: You may spend Vitality Dice on yourself as a bonus action, adding your Wisdom modifier to each die, and while you have at least one Vitality Die unspent you do not age and cannot be magically aged. Each such self-renewal is a faint but unmistakable Hollow-adjacency tell to anyone reading you with the Knowing or true seeing — the Growing is not meant to face this direction, and it shows.
• 6th — The Cost That Drifts: When you would take Fray, or spend HP to fuel a Working or your own renewal, you may push the cost outward instead. One creature within 30 feet makes a Constitution saving throw against your Green Working DC, taking 2d8 necrotic damage on a failure (half on success) — plants around it wilt, warmth is drawn out of the air, and you pay nothing: you take no HP loss and gain no Fray from a Working paid this way. The damage rises to 3d8 at 10th level and 4d8 at 14th. Every use of this feature is an unmistakable Hollow-adjacency tell, and living things remember what you spend on them.
• 10th — Years Bought, Years Burned: At the start of each of your turns you regain HP equal to half your Hearthwarden level (rounded down), unless you took radiant or Order/Binding damage since your last turn, or you stand within a Binding circle. In addition, once per long rest, when you would drop to 0 HP you drop to 1 instead — the winter in you simply declines the ending, and something living within 30 feet withers by exactly as much as it costs to refuse.
• 14th — The Ledger Slides Onto the World: You no longer age, cannot die of natural causes, and cannot be reduced below 1 HP by disease, poison, or exhaustion. The cost of all this does not vanish; it drifts. For every week you persist by this Covenant, a small living thing near where you sleep withers without cause, and any place you dwell in for a full season begins — faintly, deniably — to read as Hollow-touched to those who can see such things. You have made yourself a slow, patient wound, and taught the world to heal around you rather than close.