Popping In and Out of the Genie Bottle

I am going to be playing in a new D&D campaign that my friend Mark is running. He invited me to join his campaign that's launching in a couple weeks. I'm excited at the prospect, because he runs really fun games, but there was a schedule conflict. His game is every Monday, but I have a commitment that will keep me away every second Monday. The existing event is my Amber campaign I run twice a month, and neither game could easily be rescheduled.

So it seemed I was going to have to decline the invitation. Having a player miss 50% of D&D sessions is pretty rough. Either somebody else would have to play my character half the time, or we'd have to just kind of handwave/ghost my presence. It would be quite the narrative headache.  Unless...

The solution I hit upon was that I'll play a Warlock with a very demanding Genie Patron. (This Warlock subclass is in Tasha's Cauldron of Everything.) In the sessions where I (the player) am not there, my character will have been drawn into the Lamp, and is performing some task for the Genie. One of the other Party members will pick up the Lamp, and hang it on a loop on their backpack. Then start of the next session, I pop out of the Lamp, and grab it off their loop. "Hey guys, I'm back! Sorry about that, the Patron insisted I help them out, but I'm totally free now. What did I miss?"

It's bending the rules a bit, as per the Genie Warlock rules you can only be in the Lamp for an hour or two, but that's the PC's limitations. It's a small and harmless house rule for the Patron to not be limited the way the PC is. 

So now I just have to figure out what flavor of Warlock to be. We'll be starting with 3rd Level characters, and we'll be in Faerun using the 2024 rules, but the GM is pretty permissive about what books you can use. So I've built a couple variations, and am still trying to figure out what I want to play. What I'm theorycrafted thus far includes:

Idea #1: A gentle water-giant, native to the Moonshae Isles, but wandering about seeking places of natural beauty and power. 

• Species: Firbolg. (From Mordenkainen's Monsters of the Multiverse. An 8-foot tall Fey who can talk to animals, and cast disguise self or turn briefly invisible)
• Genie Type: Marid. (Water genie. Lots of weather spells on their list. Fog. Cone of Cold.)
• Background: Moonwell Pilgrim. (From the recent Heroes of Faerun book. Druidic Magic Initiate, specific to Moonshae Isles region of Faerun)

The "Lamp" might be a canteen, which I open and submerge whenever I find a really special body of water, so that the Genie can draw some in to add to their collection. I see this as a really chill, zen character, cataloguing sacred springs and the like for the Marid's inscrutable reasons.

Idea #2: Someone who died in a rockslide or earthquake that a Dao created or felt responsible for, so they unearthed him and used a Wish to restore his body to life. (Or, maybe the Dao is a bastard who just wanted a pet, so they crushed someone to make one.)

• Species: Reborn (From Van Richtens Guide to Ravenloft. Basically, this is a non-evil Undead, with some memory-issues / plot-hooks.)
• Genie Type: Dao. (Earth genie. Standout early spells are Sanctuary and Spike Growth.)
• Background: Rune Carver (From Bigby Presents Glory of the Giants. Gives access to Comprehend Languages and then a smattering of other 1st-level spells.)

The "Lamp" in this case might be some sort of runestone or stone tablet. Or, it might be an Urn, since I'm reborn. 

Rune Carver seems like fun from a roleplaying perspective as being another thing the Genie taught me, and/or an explanation of what I'm doing when I'm in the Lamp being busy in the off-weeks: carving runes for the boss. 

That said, I'm not 100% convinced Rune Carver (or rather the Rune Shaper Feat it includes) is worth it mechanically. It gives you more spell variety than Magic Initiate, and even gives you 2 spells per day. It's just that one of those two is Comprehend Languages, which might well be irrelevant all campaign. I think the two Cantrips of that more-common Feat are probably going to be more generally useful in most campaigns. It's a strange trade-off, hard to weigh against the other option, which does admittedly make for interesting decisions. I worry Rune Shaper will result in recurring negative play experience. "Hey guys, technically, if we take a Long Rest now, I could have the right spell for this situation tomorrow" Thing is, that better spell is still just 1st level. It seems like a tall order to convince the rest of the party to camp down early so you can swap out a 1st level spell. Ironically, this would be a better choice if we were playing from 1st character level instead of starting at 3rd level. I'm probably worrying about nothing, as the overall package has a lot of upsides. I keep going back and forth about it.

I made both characters, but I'm not sure yet if I'll play one of those, or take a third stab at it.  I do really enjoy making characters.

One thing that came into clarity for me while making these characters is that I'm really not a fan of most of the Backgrounds in the 2024 PHB. It's a little weird that they bug me as much as they do. Because they include a combat-relevant Feat, they are indisputably stronger than the identically-named Backgrounds they replaced, but the rarely used social connection mechanics those 2014 Backgrounds had were what made me love the Backgrounds when 5e first came out. 

When I mentioned my character ideas to the DM, Mark said he's open to most 3rd-party content. So I'm now a little tempted to break open Crooked Moon, because I feel like it had some really weird Species to play in it.