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| Sentience, by TylerReitan |
Imagine you are wearing a blindfold. And now you have earplugs in your ears. And now I close off your nose, but don't prevent you from breathing. And finally, I'll have you drink a liquid that will numb your taste buds. What can you sense?
Well, you can't see or hear anything, you can't smell anything, and you can't taste, but you can still touch stuff (because that sense is hard to remove and I am a lazy person). You can sense when something causes you pain, you can sense balance and speed of your body, where your body parts are... you can sense a lot of things. You can sense temperature, and even time, knowing this analogy has been going on for too long.
Imagine you had a spell that removed your earplugs temporarily. You could finally hear others, hear the music, hear anything that can be heard, until the spell expires and they go back into your ears, returning you to your silence. Now, compare this to the spell detect thoughts, where you get to read minds of others temporarily.
Where I'm going with this is a simple question - what makes up the phenomenal world in D&D 5e? Phenomenal as in "made up of phenomenon", not amazing or something. In reality, thoughts can't be heard by anyone but you. They are not really empirical then, are they? Sure we've now got machines that are getting better and better at reading thoughts, so this might not be the best example, but I felt like it might be the easiest one to understand - we are all wearing metaphorical blindfolds.
Phenomenal World
What everything is a part of the phenomenal world of D&D? For that we'll have to list everything that can be sensed. But before that, here's a list of what is not a special sense in my opinion:- Blindsight. It's technically just a way to say that a creature has a dominant sense which is not sight - a way to "perceive its surroundings without relying on sight, within a specific radius". Tremorsense is a special form of it.
- Arcane Eye and other spells that grant "distant vision". All these do is an out-of-body perception. It's still sight, just from a different place.
- Augury and other "answering" spells. It's a message of yes/no/both/neither on a question regarding the upcoming course of actions. I have a feeling this is not a sense, but I am open to discussion.
- Faultless Tracker. All the creatures or spells that allow for flawless tracking of a creature, knowing their distance and direction... that's why I'm gonna exclude this from the senses.
- Speak with Plants and Dead. Originally I wanted to include them as senses, but then I realized that the spells used to allow this communication transform the dead/plant, not the magic caster.
Special Senses
Special senses described in Monster Manual:- see in magical and non-magical darkness, including color (part of truesight)
- see invisible creatures (part of truesight)
- see through visual illusions (part of truesight)
- see original form of shapechangers or creatures transformed by magic (part of truesight)
- see into ethereal plane (part of truesight)
- feel vibrations (tremorsense)
Special senses from creatures:
- see magic (chuul)
- see past and future (gynosphinx)
- hear creature's greatest desires (aboleth)
- hear thoughts (doppelganger)
- hear telepathical conversations (flumph)
- know when you hear lies (planetar)
- smell particular kind(s) of material (rust monster, xorn)
- feel presence of living creatures (banshee)
- feel presence of creatures with high enough intelligence (intellect devourer)
- feel pain of other creatures (myconid sprout)
- feel secrets of a creature (nothic)
- feel emotions by touch, as well as alignments (sprite) [Note: I'm not a fan of alignments, but I've already talked about that once.]
Special senses from spells:
- hear what animals speak
- sense prevalent plants, minerals, animals or peoples; terrain and bodies of water; influence from other planes of existence and buildings
- hear and read langauges
- feel presence and location of creature types
- sense poison, poisonous creature and disease, as well as type of poison, poisonous creature or disease
- sense presence and location of objects and devices (such as traps)
- sense properties of a magic item
- see doors hidden by magic
Special senses I just made up, or found somewhere else in D&D and can't quite remember:
- see/hear into echoes of plane you are on (Material Plane, Feywild, etc.)
- feel which way is north
- see through walls
- hear movement
- feel bloodlines (planetouched/sorcerous potential) by touch
- smell what plane are you on
- know what time of day it is, how long until the next sunrise or sunset (or equivalents of that for different planes)
- see entire spectrum of light, including infrared, ultraviolet etc. (and know how to make sense of it)
Allsense, Allseer and Akashic Archives
(almost accidental alliteration achieved) |
| Bookworms Village, by APetruk |
I've been thinking about the idea of Akashic Records a lot lately, and I figured that it would be cool to include them in 5e somehow.
Let's begin with the allsense. What allsense is is all of the senses above, as well as senses that will be invented one day, bundled up into one neat word (the definition would get too wordy to write out, so I won't bother). It is the very definition of sensory overload, being all of the senses at the same time. Having this sense would make a creature locally omniscient, but not all creatures can bear this much information.
Somewhere in the Akashic Archives lies a being labeled by many names, but for now I will call it Allseer. Allseer is the only being in the multi-multiverse that has allsense with unlimited range. It can perceive everything and anything that could have ever been perceived. It knows all of the phenomenal worlds there could be. But with such vast knowledge, it is too stunned to take any action. It just receives, perceives, observes. There are other beings with him, beings I'll label archivists. What archivists do is they filter knowledge gained by Allseer, having allsense themselves but with a limited radius, and afterwards they allocate it into books of the archive. Picture the archive itself as a sort of a Library of Babel, infinite bookshelves of books that are still being filled in. Why do they gather all this information is a mystery to most beings in the multi-multiverse, it is a mystery even to them. They just... do.
How could an Allseer look? That is a good question, though a better question is - what can it be sensed as? It looks like a huge light gray blur with smaller black blur in the middle, sounds like a dripping water in a metal ship tens of feet away from you, on touch it feels like a warm air and its smell is a mixture of several things so unique you can't even comprehend what everything is in there. But the more senses you take on, the clearer your image gets. Eventually, if you gained the allsight, you would get the clearest possible view, but at that point you would be the same as Archivists, with a literal sensory overload.
Allseer could serve as a warlock patron. When contacted by someone, it can respond with a yes or no. Whether I'll find a fitting patron for him or make one up myself one day is unknown to me just yet, but out of the official ones, Great Old One fits the best. Out of homebrew ones, Accursed Archive would fit rather well, and Keeper of the Depths should fit if you wanted to assume a role of more adaptable mage, if it was somehow rid of the sea flavor (pages 4 and 9 of this PDF, shout out to /u/GenuineBelieverer).
Archivists work on other things besides writing books into the archive too. One of their major activities is crafting magic items of a specific kind. These magic items can be used to store memories, letting others relive them when they will it, mostly during sleep. I'd say it works like animus in Assassin's Creed series, but the ancestor has to use magic item to store their memories in it, and they don't have to be related to the readers of memories. Other than that, they might craft magic items that grant their wearers with the senses temporarily.
But let's get back to archivists themselves. How exactly should we view them? Well, since I've excluded the modrons and mechanus from my cosmology, I feel like this would be a perfect kind of replacement. Afterall, most of this sounds like stuff machines would do - one big machine that would gather data, lots of smaller machines with similar data-gathering capabilities, storing them into books and producing items that serve for literal memory storage. They resemble high-tech constructs. I view them as Riftborn from Endless Space 2, with all those floating metallic bits. Modrons suddenly seem very interesting once we give them a new kind of flavor.
(And to those who genuinely like modrons or are fine with them, I apologize.)
Usage in games
- One of the players is a warlock of Allseer, and they know exactly what their mission is, without any response from the patron themselves - gather and record. Their task is to document everything, just like Archivists do. Sometimes it might get them into troubles, but the infromation they get as a reward is worth it.
- An archivist is found outside of the Akashic Archive, and it needs to find its way back. It won't be fooled, and it will reward anyone who will help it out with a magic item or two.
- Ruins left after the ancient civilization were mostly searched, but in a place nobody else seemed to find, hidden behind a hard puzzle, lies a helmet/necklace/wristband/item, that allows you to dream of the past, to dream of the former owner of this item and the civilization that was a long time ago.
- One of the player wakes up one day with a random new sense, which lasts for 24 hours. Maybe they can suddenly smell the presence of iron, or they know when they hear a lie. They might be able to hear thoughts of those who are physically close to them, almost anything from the lists above can work.
- Maybe seeing what can't be unseen is a curse rather than a gift. In that case, I can refer you to a friend's article all about third eyes.
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