Shardminds

### Bonuses

Deep Resilience - Resistance to Psychic DamageNatural Telepathy - Can communicate and be communicated with through psionics.

Proficiency in Arcana

### Abilities

Shard Swarm: The Shardmind turns into a cloud of morphic crystals. They gain advantage on attacks against enemies within five feet of them and then blink out of existence, reappearing at a location as far as half their move-speed away.Shattering: Once per Long Rest a Shardmind can cast a mass of psychic energy towards a target within 35 feet, causing them to make a wisdom saving throw with DC equal to 10+Int Modifier. On a failure the target takes 3d8 psychic damage. On a success they take half damage. Targets that would be brought below 1 by this damage do not fall below 1 and instead lose their minds.

At the end of the war against the Outer Gods there was a great need for gates to be put in place to keep denizens of the Far Realm outside of the greater cosmos. The gods settled on two large gates to seal the two greater incursion points. The first was the seal of Nyarlathotep and remains secure to this day, but the second gate (the Living Gate) shattered, allowing small amounts of invaders into the multiverse (most notably the Illithid), and in its shattering created the Shardminds. The forces of Ioun are occupied fully on neutralizing any threats from the Far Realm that could break into the Astral Plane, but most shardminds believe that ultimately, it is their duty to reseal the barrier and keep the invading forces at bay once again. This is where the Shardminds come into their core philosophy and the disagreement that leads them in their pursuit of greater knowledge.

There are four primary groups of thought among the shardminds, each completely certain of the logic behind their philosophy and apprehensive at the others.

The **Thought Builders** believe that the Living Gate must be restored at all costs, and that building the gate up piece by piece is the proper way to do this, although many of the thought builders believe that the link between the shattering of the gate and the emergence of psionics in the multiverse are linked. Someday they believe they may need to sacrifice their own beings to reseal the gate, saving the lives of billions in the process.

The **God Shards** believe instead that they are pieces of the Living Gate despite its shattering, and that by increasing their own power as much as they can they keep the multiverse safe.

The **Shard Slayers** seek out pieces of the gate, both inanimate crystals and animate shardminds and destroy them. The Slayers believe that when shardminds die their essence returns to the gate, and therefore genocide is the only way to save the rest of life in the multiverse.

The fourth group is more disparate and less connected. They believe that the destruction of the first gate was an inevitability as would be the destruction of a second. They do not see the inherent value of others in the multiverse and wonder if their own lives are not valuable. The actions of the gods caused their first gate to be destroyed, why should they protect a multiverse that cares for them so little? The questions weigh heavier on some than others.

All Shardminds regardless of allegiance or alignment find themselves to be logical yet morphic and flexible, many often alter their own forms to be more like the forms of living things they admire or respect. They are very slow to show emotional responses and the ones they do show may be vague or hard to interpret. For this reason many creatures only see Shardminds express emotions in their most extreme in both positive and negative ways. Shardminds are not good companions to those who lack empathy and reason.