Monster Ecology : Shardmind
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 28 เม.ย. 2017
- Shardminds are sentient fragments of the Living Gate, which once stood at the pinnacle of the intricate lattice of the Astral Sea. Beyond that gate lay the alien Far Realm, and the gate's destruction during the Dawn War resulted in the rise of the mind flayer empire. Though Ioun's power holds the portal closed, shardminds seek to rebuild the gate and forever cut off the Far Realm's ability to influence the world.
www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Shardmi...)
Holy moly, what monster will I cover next?
Can you still play them in 5e? If yes where do i get their official race stats?
I would hazard a guess that they will be included for future psionics sourcebooks, at present as best I know there is no official published 5E version, but the homebrew conversion I presented is, in my opinion, well put together and a faithful representation of them. the link for that is here > www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Shardmind_(5e_Race)
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@@aarashghabely5315 2!
I imagine them sounding like wind-chimes when they speak.
Autotuned wind chimes.
Zasek2112 that’s actually a really cool idea
I think it’d be even cooler if their voice changed depending on their mood, like, if they’re angry their voice shifts to sound like grinding rocks, or when they’re sad it shifts to sound more like breaking glass.
@@willrogers3793 love this idea
like the Auto-Tune the News outro?
These guys would be a great homebrew addition to a Dark Sun campaign.
Very true...and has inspired me to make a crystal, stone, and bone variety of Warforged for Dark Sun.
Yeah I could totally see the sorcerer kings making a shard of their temple into one! Neat idea
On a slightly unrelated note... Creative Assembly is publicly looking at options for their next Fantasy Total War game and they have said DND settings are on the table.
I'm trying to whip up support for Dark Sun Total War!
I really think the city states would work well with the total war engine. Tek tree could let you pick defiling or preserving etc..
It's a real longshot but you guys seem like Darksun fans so thought I'd spread the word..
Hope you don't mind AJ
This race would fear the crystal eating relative of the Rust Monster as much as Warforged fear Rust Monsters.
Ohhh, Just got to the part where you describe how they can eat. One would assume that they can choose when to expell stored food? And one would expect that they can use their psychic control over their body to regulate their internal temperature... I'm imagining a Shard Mind that can drink some water, eat a bunch of grain and hopps, boil it inside them selves, and then drink some yeast starter. Then 6 weeks later or at the end of an extended and successful campaign, "Expell" fresh, high quality beer.... ewe. And yum. But mostly ewe.
Hexx Bombastus I may use that idea.
AJ Pickett just give him the odd quirk of burping loudly sometimes, expelling the pressure of fermenting gasses. Maybe a feint sloshing noise as it walks...
Ooooooohhh... I'm playing a Shardmind Wizard. I'd bet I can use this somehow. :-P
He could make corn liquor too. :-P
Hexx Bombastus So... basically... you would literally be drinking piss.
"Eh been drinkin' the piss ay?"
* awkward looks are passed between the player and his shardmind companion * "Y-yeah..."
Definitely going to make them a race option for my players for our 5e Spelljammer campaign
To be a fly on the wall in a room with a warforged and a shardmind who are Millennials old as they talk about things they've learned seen and experienced that would be an interesting conversation
“Fleshies are wierd.”
“Yep.”
Thank you so much for covering this. Topics important to 4e are too often ignored on TH-cam.
No problem, as I've often mentioned, I thought 4th edition was great and understood the design considerations, there are many who never even tried the system, their arguments are many, varied and true to them, I'm not about to devalue their right to choose, however, I bought the books, I supported the company, and now, we have 5th edition.. if the company went under, we would all have lost out, hugely. So, yes, I am proud to have kept the faith and supported the company, for every edition of the game.
I love psychic abilities or psionics
I knew you'd say that
You're my favorite child because you always give the right information about Dungeons & Dragons😎
Ever since I read the 2nd Edition Psionic book. Created a Psychic Warrior-Psion team based on Jedi after the 3E version came out. Ever since Psions (or “Mind Mages”) have been part of ever setting I create.
Amazing stuff. Whip up shardminds at 20 different levels, and a campaign through the realms to assemble the gate, where the pc shardmind gains levels by defeating and absorbing the other shardminds to become the gate god. Back stories for villains would be all the shardminds THEY absorbed, and inner conflict could easily be represented by will dc’s to resist absorbed shardminds’ influence.
i for one really enjoy the psychic stuff i think it add a nice flavor to the setting
I've been all about psi powes since the Ad&d hand book from the 90's.
Back when the X-Men were the @#$&.
There's always a place for magic and psionic to exist side by side, there just two aspects of power, magic draws from external forces and psionic is draw from within
I had a weird idea to have the Shardmind crystals and a fairy getting spell stiched together though a mad wizard and a hybrid player character homebrew fusion table.
Was messing around with a shardmind character recently, discussing it with a friend (and the DM for the campaign it was for). Tried to come up with an easy way to tell if I was speaking aloud via vibration, or telepathing someone, and it devolved into a discussion of how the two "voices," would sound different.
Basically, for the Farshard I was making, we came to the idea that the telepathy voice would just sound like HAL (or my best impression), and the full body vibration would be some form of musical monotone, or jumping between harmonic series notes. Or, of course, some kind of robot voice after the singing gets annoying. XP
Love this lore. This race is going to be a big reveal in my campaign!
What I truly would love to see is an ecology on steel predators. One of my campaigns will involve at least one and one of my Ex-PC now diety characters has a few of them, but I haven't seen a lot of source material on them let alone whether they actually can be reasoned with, used as a cohort etc. I homebrew them quite a bit, but maybe you'd be able to find more information about them than I have searching the webs and in the books.
Anyways, I enjoy watching your lore videos as I enjoy adapting previous or current editions to my worlds so you've earned a subscriber. I look forward to future videos.
I bet Shardminds sound like they are autotuned
Oh man, that is perfect.
That is now canon for my games.
YES!!! Get a autotuner for your phone when you voice NPC lol
They probably don’t say anything. Or maybe you’re right.
Thanks for the vid AJ. Ive been looking for something like the Shard for some time to use as living crystal statues. This provides some flavor that could be used for them I think.
Most welcome!
Brilliant- I am going to slot these into the southern regions of Xen’drik close by the Riedran crysteel mining/production strongholds geographically close to Dar Qat… awakened sentience of Rushemé embodied.
Really enjoy the left ear right ear intro music balance shifting
Kind of high
Love your videos
Much love!
Although Im not sure "ostensibly" is the best word to use around the 40 sec mark
I needed something to help fill a void in my plot, and these sated it perfectly.
I never used these beings in my games. Awesome coverage of them, my player that created one did not do this race justice. I allowed one as a player character when he adapted it to Loom of Magus (my campaign). My campaign universe has its ancients, one of which are the Crystonians. That player actually came up with the name, I called them "the Ancients". They used crystal technology and were uber-strong with all energies (magic and psionic) as well as using "CrysTech" (crystal technology) as their basis for that. Crystonian items are considered artifacts. I created the race to be a superior race and culture that eventually divided and imploded, spawning the other races... with other background stuff tweaking that (more complicated than dysfunctional family histories). When I created Crystonians, I was inspired by the 80s Superman movie (Kryptonian tech) for their tech base. That was a long-standing vision I got as a kid from the 70s TV series Land of the Lost, the reptilian bad guy bipeds. At the time, I saw the race as a bad copy of my vision. I now owe that friend an apology. Shardminds would have been an awesome adaption into Loom of Magus. I need to nab you and bring you to my 80s and 90s self.
See, my brain linked them to Crystar when I first came across them.
1:08 One of my favorite all time characters happens to be psionic warforged, and if anyone has a problem with my precious shiny child then we can't be buddies. Good day, sir.
What if we love it? Instant buddies? Good day, sir.
Soooo... the Primordials and Gods were playing D&D? :-P
I'd bet the Dawn War was them arguing about a DM ruling or one of them catching another of them cheating on their roles. :-D
Yes!! And the races are all echoes of their characters!!
An utterly fascinating race. This really sparks the imagination.
The shard mind was once a race
Ah yes, psionics, either something completely different from arcane magic, or arcane magic, but weird
So the quam(probably spelling that wrong) have a reverse of most religions. They had, essentially, lived in a heaven and then they were randomly and seemingly for no good reason forced out and into a hard life of struggles and toil. Neat idea
Quom, and yes, I think it is one of the most tragic casualties of the shunning of 4th edition, the living gate was such a great concept!
@@AJPickett Well, the good bits, as few and far between as those seem to have been, undoubtedly survive in countless campaigns. Just like the best bits of 2nd and 3/3.5. Along with some from 1st (I had a lot of that lore hang in there)
Great is the unmaker, he of night eternal that clears away the illusion that is static reality when all is chaos in truth. Fantastic stuff.
got to play one a bit in 4th ed did not know about the qualm though thanks AJ
I'm a fan of the Qom, they look so odd, having a face on both the front and back of the head, a build similar to that of dwarves, odd, pastel skin tones, and yeah, kind of crazy.. a fun encounter to spring on players when they have no idea what they are dealing with.
I would do anything for a video on the Quom.
oooooh! I kow what I'm playing next!
My new favorite race! ... After Gnomes.
This sounds like the Yugoslav Wars of D&D.
I'll have to take your word for that.
We.... are the crystal gems
lol!
Well done :)
Nice. I may be able to make a pretty cool Aberrant Mind Sorcerer using this race.
Anyone else rewatching this after solar dragon collab w/ Dungeon Dad?
I may have a portion of the shardmind show up as a crystal dragon from Fizban’s or Gem Greatwyrm. Maybe controlled by an evil entity but could become a powerful ally.
The description kinda reminds me of the outsider in xcom, though they were more of a remote controlled crystal through psychic energy.
Thanks again A.J.!
Most welcome Jeffrey!
Hmm. How they "eat". You said they can "... choose when to expel it later... " I wonder if they could also choose to process and metabolize the food as well. Maybe they can store it in them, choose to expel it as is by just letting it fall out of them (sort of like the Ghost Brothers from Casper the Friendly Ghost or Slimer from Ghostbusters); or metabolize it by heating it to such a degree is carbonizes into charcoal and the charcoal, being carbon, just gets absorbed into their crystalline structure thereby being able to be used for "healing" (aka repairing in their case) their crystals when damaged or for making themselves larger. Maybe they can metabolize food if they so wish to consume it and it turns to charcoal and said charcoal carbon could be burnt inside their structure to form life energy within them.
LOOOTS of possibilities!!!
So theyre made of the same stuff thats need to create the Githyanki Vorpal swords??? Nuts!!
Great
Thanks.
Do a video on the cube plain the orcs are from or a video on the plane with three giant volcanos
See: Rust Dragon (plane of Acheron) and I think I talked about Tartarus in a video on drakes as well.
Nice vid. Could you do one on the Loxodon please?
They are a cool race and their ancient history is awesome. But I have questions. What have they been up to in the mean time? I wonder do they have any citys? What civilizations of them have arose and fallen? Who gets along with them and who doesn't? They are the pieces of a god's mind, so what do the gods think of them? They remember their race's origin so do they remember any of their race's history? So many questions.
I would think anything that a shardmind ingests wouldn't be just stored and expelled later in fact I would think could be converted into energy some form of psionic fusion or fission in the matter it would at least make more sense at least with them the warforged on the other hand unless they have something in them similar to a stomach that converts matter into energy they would probably store it and discard it later
ive always wanted to play a shardmind,but i have yet to be a part of a game where i was allowed the opportunity....
the closesed thing i have ever played was a warforged whose eyes,heart and right arm were made out of psionicly charged deep crystal
So they are psychic golems and an ancient interplanal version of warforge that are the shattered pieces of an interdimensional gate that regulated the flow and influence of the far realm, and naturally the gate seeks to rebuild itself so that it may continue to do what it is made to do.
A maenad video would be sweet *wink* *wink*
Did not know anything about this sort of thing. Out of curiosity, since their close history with the far realm, what would Shardminds relation be with aberrations in general? Like I think the Ilithid had ships that traveled through the astral sea. But also Beholders which travel from the far realm, flumphs which attach to psychic societies, or great old one entities which the inherent 30 feet is kind of similar to a pact with.
I had also been working on a homebrew race that would have come from far realm with inherent psychic abilities. And a class to go with that would channel far realm to copy the powers of an aberration creature (Flumph, Mimic, or Beholder), and a race that used to be part of a gate between the places kind of intrigues me?
Relations with Flumphs would be interesting to outside observers, as the Shardmind would show them a lot of respect and a reverent approach, reacting with anger to anyone who attempted to mistreat the Flumphs, because the Shardmind would be in psychic contact with the creatures and have a much better understanding of what the Flumph really are. They would be wary of Beholders, just like anyone else, and destroy them given the chance (if they are that way inclined, after all, Shardmind can also be evil). They actively kill any Mind Flayers that they can, consider it a racial enmity, even evil Shardmind will tend to kill Mind Flayers in preference to anyone else. They would have a wide vocabulary of insulting nick names for them and as a DM I would give them advantage on knowledge checks for Aberrations. They probably have no greater knowledge of Primordials than anyone else. I like the idea of them being able to channel far realm energy, perhaps they could take that as a pact option for Warlocks, or a power source option for sorcerers?
ok...what are Flumphs?
Flumphs are floating psychic jellyfish like aberrations (strange creatures), feed on other psychic energy, and one of the few good creatures in the otherwise evil Underdark. From what I have seen people often think they are useless because they are not very strong, but strength does not make the only useful part for a campaign.
I think the default of optimisation, detracts from some of the new options. Being born of one element so studying another for a metagamed optimization seems less potent over the life of a character rather than more potent.
Unless your a Mage, then you learn to juggle, with the bard.
I know this may be a dead thread, amazing info on a cool race, but for AJ or someone else who may know, what about the quom, are there any resources that showcase them at all, they seem pretty unique.
Hey AJ. Can you do an episode on the Elder Elemental Eye? My party are going to end up against this entity in their endgame. I have found out the basics of it but info is hard to some by...
OK, I covered a lot of what Tharizdun is about in this video, but he deserves the full treatment, you are quite right.
Don't strain yourself if there isn't enough material ;) I've found most if the readily avaliable stuff online but I do not have any copies of the earlier books to reference.
I'm running a campaign where I'd like to have the end game with the PCs going to the abyss and destroying the elder elemental eye, freeing the elemental lords from its influence
Technically Tharizdun, the Elder Elemental Eye, is not in the Abyss, he is trapped in a separate universe, so the only way his followers can interact with him is via ancient artefacts that still remain, scattered around the D&D universe. Tharizdun must be particularly difficult to destroy, hence why an unprecedented alliance of all gods and many primordials banded together to banish him to another universe. Effectively removing him forever from the D&D Universe would require feeding every fragment of every artefact and location infused with his remnant essence, into a sphere of annihilation, so he had no means of interacting with the D&D Universe ever again.
He is in an Abyss, but a different one, called the Voidharrow I believe :) Could possibly be crossing points between universes in the depths of our Abyss?
Maybe it is just the way I read it, but it seemed it was hinted at Tharizdun and the Elder Elemental Eye as a somewhat separate entity. He needed some way to influence the prime material plane, but had no power there as the creator of the Abyss, managed to slip an essence of himself into it and as the abyss resides in the elemental chaos was able to reach as far as the elemental planes.
Either way I don't plan on having the party defeat him directly, but rather sever the connections between him and the elementals, even if only temporarily (1000s of years to mortals, drop in the bucket for him kind of thing). How that happens exactly is flexible at this point in time
Sounds like a plan :D
Be sure to throw in some fickle, vain, dangerously powerful Genies of all kinds.
I love psionics, but it's almost impossible to have them mixed in with the rest of the game. It's either everything is psychic or nothing is (normal MM creatures excepted)
These guys strike me as Psychic Warforged. I'm not opposed to either but unless the setting has at least a few of them running around, I feel they're kind of jarring to the immersion....
Several ideas:
1) Got dropped through a Gate into the world from somewhere else. Lots of “strange being in a strange land” potential.
2) They are many, but came to the world recently via their huge crystal (Spelljamming?) ship crashing to the world.
3) They are few, remnants of an ancient people. Most have only ever heard of one of their kind in ancient tales.
4) They are an ancient people, and well established, but dwelled on a continent recently discovered by the people of the setting; or the other way around, the people of the main setting being “discovered” by their explorers on beautiful crystal airships.
I got a similar sense. They are pretty much ancient interdimensional warforge. However I don't see any reason why they can't coexist, really the warforge resembling the shardminds seems to be entirely coincidental.
Sir!! What if the stone of chaos is the creator god from their thing. It's chaos and the head god is balance. They did something with him im sure!
Did you do Firbolg post Volo's?
Firbolg are on the list, I can bump them up a bit.
Would a half gem dragon be like a shardmind? I am purely interested in your projessional speculations..
@The Meat but gem dragons are the psionic dragons. But that wasn’t what I was asking. Gem dragons are drawn as if they aren’t flesh and blood (in some art they look transparent).Hence why I asked if a half-gem dragon would be like a shardmind, as far as being not-flesh goes. However...my question was answered. Gem dragons are flesh and blood, artwork just be trippin
Technically Mystryll gets killed... Mystra is her daughter/ reincarnation.
More like shartmind
Can u be a shardmind palladin
Yes.
Christar inpired?
The link inbtheir description doesn't work
should be fixed now, thanks for the heads up. www.dandwiki.com/wiki/Shardmind_(5e_Race)
Shardminds are great! Screw the quom! (Not really. I like the quom too but don't tell the shardminds plz)
The shardminds end objective is exactly the same as the Quom's, to come together and form a singular entity.
what exactly is the living crystal?
It is/was a god. The Quom are a humanoid race who lived within the crystal god (4th edition lore)
@@AJPickett thanks :)
Crystal Gems
They have no qualms about killing got it.
I'm gonna avoid this race in my campaign setting since I'm starting as a new game manager . I'm gonna create a world without magic as in this setting magic will be a thing of the past sometime magic might return , but the the sake of my mind and management skills I'll start with just basic races and abilities dwarf ,elf ,human ,no deities , no magic, this would also mean magical beings and animals vanish from the world people start to disbelieve magic ever existed after thirty years kinda like one of the Dragon lance settings.
What... But Halflings...
antwan1357 So, everyone in the party will be Fighters or Rogues; no real monsters; no potions. Just grim and gritty Sword without the Sorcery.
Hopefully you and your players enjoy it.
It has been a few years after the fact . At this point i just kept the levels low games only going up to level 5 . Then basically I allowed players to control more then one character. Each with a max level of five. this allowed for combo builds specialized roles preventing one character from being overpowered. I learned how to spam enemies and npc followers with an app that was free as long as i stayed below lvl 5 keeping the game pace very fast. I kept magic in the game anything they wanted even items on my app as long as they where lvl 5 or under. If i went higher i had to pay money so you know i went cheap .
My god the early days of D&D creation are confusing.
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