Tempered Soul

Tempered Soul

Tempered Soul is a feat granted to every member of Deez Nuts when their souls were reforged in the Hells and they signed A Compact of restoration and continuance in Session 50. It is as much a roleplaying device as a mechanic.

As of S52 (2026-07-12) the feat has evolved into Tempered Soul: Aspects — see the Aspects below. On D&D Beyond, the old Tempered Soul feat is deleted and Tempered Soul: Aspects added in its place, with your Aspect chosen from the drop-down. (If both feats linger on your sheet you'll see duplicate actions — remove the old feat and refresh.)

How it works

Immediately after you make a D20 Test, before you learn the outcome, you may add a soul die to the roll — or to a save DC you are imposing on another creature. Every spend must be narrated: tell the table the feeling, memory, or instinct you pour into the moment.

You hold two dice:

• The base d4 — usable on any roll, always. The universal floor.
• Your Aspect d6 — usable only on rolls inside your Aspect's domain (table below). In-domain use is also what grows the Aspect.

The charge pool. Your pool equals the total sides of every soul die you hold — currently 10 (base d4 + Aspect d6). Rolling a die costs charges equal to its sides: a d4 costs 4, a d6 costs 6. On a full pool that is one d6 and one d4, or two d4s. You may always roll the smaller die to spend less, even in-domain.

Recovery. A long rest refills the pool; a short rest restores half of your maximum. Camping overnight counts as a long rest.

The Aspects

Using the feat repeatedly in the same domain tempers the soul in that direction until it crystallizes into an Aspect. The DM: "you have used your tempered soul enough times in a single domain that you have… basically leveled up your soul a little bit." All six party Aspects crystallized during S52 — and Carl, reforged alongside the company, has one too.

Character	Aspect	Domain (in-domain rolls may take the d6)
Shade	Arcane Certainty	Rolls made in unhesitating confidence of her own magical power — spell attack rolls and spell save DCs, especially destructive evocation; saving throws she faces down through sheer self-belief in her craft; Arcana wielded as a flex rather than a question. Out of domain: subtlety, humility, mundane skill, and anything attempted while genuinely unsure of herself.
Baelgrum	Protector's Debt	Anything done to shield, aid, heal, or rescue people under his care — attack or spell rolls that deliver protection or a cure, save DCs of warding spells, saves he must pass so that others stay safe, and checks made to set right a harm he shares responsibility for. Out of domain: plain aggression, self-enrichment, and — pointedly — pure vengeance.
Xanphina	Hellworn Fury	Rolls powered by rage sustained past all reason — attacks and feats of strength while raging, pressing a fight that has already outlasted her, refusing to drop.
Karma	Heartwood Resolve	Rolls where she plants herself and refuses to bend — saves against mental or emotional assault, spell DCs backed by total conviction, holding a form or a position past sense.
Keyleth	The Righteous Hunt	Rolls made against prey she has judged deserving — attacks on marked or hunted quarry, harvesting the deserving dead, acts of retributive judgment.
Gootcha	Raven's Remembrance	Rolls fueled by deliberate memory — of the dead, of dead skills, of moments the Raven Queen marked; acts done in her sight (silencing, stealing back, ending what should have ended).
Carl	Aye Aye, Captain	Any roll made while visibly afraid and doing the thing regardless — following an order or keeping a promise through the fear, staying at his post when leaving is an option, speaking up with the useful thing when silence would be safer. Out of domain: anything done boldly, acts of unrequested initiative, and — by party treaty rather than soul-mechanics — all attack rolls made with his bow.

Growth

• An Aspect scales d6 → d8 → d10 → d12 → d20 with continued in-domain use — which is why the log tracks Aspect spends explicitly. A bigger Aspect die also enlarges the pool.
• One Aspect equipped. The character sheet shows three Aspect drop-down slots, but only one may be filled until a soul evolution (timing: the DM's call) unlocks the second. You can learn additional Aspects before you can equip them.
• Spreading across several Aspects makes any one of them harder to push high — "do you want to focus in one area, or do you want to branch it out so that you have broader domains?"

Rulings

• Any d20 roll is a legal target — including monster-harvesting checks (S54: with a long rest imminent in town, the entire party was allowed to spend on the same carcass).
• It may raise a save DC you impose on others — but (S53) a save-DC boost applies to only ONE creature of a multi-target spell (Baelgrum's Fireball d4+1 raised the DC for the dragonborn alone).
• The die may be added to damage (official ruling, 2026-08-09) — a legal, if less efficient, use of the surge (established by Keyleth's spends in S52 and S53).
• It may be applied to a check already rolled (retroactively), and you may spend it after you learn what you are facing — "the whole point is, like, you know whether or not you need to go bigger."
• The DM adjudicates whether a roll is in-domain.

Intent

The DM (Wes Vaske) framed this as a deliberately open-ended, evolving feature rather than a flat bonus: "this is something that you should try to use every day… it will evolve over time." Each invocation is meant to deepen the character — a small, recurring window into who each survivor became after passing through death and the Hells. The Aspects are that evolution paying out: what you reach for under fire is what your soul becomes. More of the system exists than the players have seen — "there's kind of a bunch of other stuff around it that you don't know yet, that you're gonna find out in-universe."

Usage Log

Every use is recorded on Tempered Soul/Usage Log — which die was rolled (base d4 or the named Aspect d6), what was empowered, the math, the feeling channeled, and a verbatim quote. The log is how the feat's growth is tracked over time, and the DM uses it to decide when an Aspect advances — so name your die, narrate the spend, and record both.

Holders

All reforged members of Deez Nuts — Shade, Xanphina, Keyleth, Gootcha, Karma, and Baelgrum (the soul bound in Alexios's place) — and Carl.