Canadian Animal Totems | Path of the Totem Warrior expansion, and on brewing totem spirits

This brew was inspired by Rain-Junkie's Australian Animal Totems. When I saw that brew, I thought to myself how if they're Australian and did that, I could do it as a Canadian. 

The Totem Warrior is a really great example of what I call subsubclasses. With a choice of different animal 'paths' through the levels, a player has not only chosen a subclass (Path of the Totem Warrior), they also get to customize their character further, gaining features related to bears, wolves, and eagles (and later in WotC's development, elk and tigers.) To me, this kind of customization is awesome—even though I love simplicity, getting to tailor your character perfectly is really enjoyable.

In a brewing sense, I'm also a big fan of the Totem Warrior. The PHB only provides a very limited amount of animals to play with, and SCAG offers even fewer, which is really a shame as there are a lot of animals out there. To return to Rain-Junkie's brew, when I read it, I felt that some people would find a good connection to being able to use those animals; being able to play something that feels like home is almost always a good feeling. Knowing of that feeling, I decided that it would be really cool if I made some similar totems that felt like Canada. (Of course, the idea then went into an ideas folder and wasn't touched for several months until I got it out a couple weeks ago!)

Now, I also wanted to talk a bit about the design space of totems. Right off the bat, at 3rd level, we can see that there is a definite variation in power level between these. Bear gives resistance to all damage, covering all the elements and such that rage normally can't cover, but Tiger only gives a jump increase. Now, the other PHB totems do lean closer to Bear than Tiger, but this shows that we have a lot of room to play with.

At 6th level, most of the totems get ribbons or otherwise weak features. Of course, as the 3rd level is normally quite potent, the budget here is smaller. At 14th level, they normally get something pretty decent. Wolf, Elk, and Tiger being offensive, and very potent when stacked with how prone never really dips to being bad, and Bear's kiting ability allows it to tank very consistently for the whole party. At these two levels, the power level is a lot closer to itself than at 3rd level.

Anyways, that's enough rambling for today. I hope you enjoy the brew as much as I do!