Changed

The door called him Asset before it called him by name. He flinched at that, which meant it had called him that before. Then the lights in the corridor changed from red to a color I had no word for, and every turret turned away from us by one finger-width. He told us not to thank him. He said the door had not opened for us. It had opened because something below wanted him farther in.

-- recovered fragment, ruin-company account, Below Glass Nine

What a Changed is

A Changed has made a contract with an active intelligence in the world. Not a spirit, not a voice from beyond the world. A real intelligence: buried infrastructure, fungal gestalt, android network, rogue nanite colony, dormant broadcast, or something equally present and equally difficult to understand.

The contract grants access. The Changed receives protocols, permissions, tools, sensory channels, issued constructs, or power routed through a system larger than them. The cost is not always stated clearly. The patron may not think in human categories. It may be loyal to orders older than the settlement, or to an ecology wider than a nation, or to a self-model built by machines that were never meant to want.

Changed characters are useful because they can touch systems no one else can touch. They are dangerous because something else can touch them back. The relationship can be negotiated, exploited, misunderstood, infected with bad data, or betrayed. It is still a relationship, and a real one: the patron is in the world, has a history, and can be found.

The channel the Changed carries is unlike those of other psionic classes. A Sage channels through the clarity of faction discipline. A Bloodborn channels through inherited blood. The Changed channels through a live link to a patron intelligence. CHA governs the connection because the patron-link is not a trained skill or a heritable gift; it is a relationship whose depth and reliability tracks the strength of the Changed's own psionic presence in that link. The patron transmits. The Changed receives and routes. The arrangement depends on both parties staying interested.

At a certain depth of contract, the patron issues a patron-issue grant. The most common are three: an issued resonance-weapon, forged or reclaimed from the patron's resources and recalled to the hand by will alone; an issued familiar-construct, a purpose-built autonomous figure that serves as extension and eyes; or an issued data-fragment, a codex of the patron's knowledge and its language, composed in a hand not the Changed's own. These are not gifts. They are tools the patron wants deployed.

Chassis

Class features

The Changed's class features are the mechanics of a patron-link that deepens over time. The chassis provides the channel structure; the subclass, chosen at L1, defines the patron. All Changed share the same psionic channeling economy -- the patron-access channel -- but the source of the link, and what it expects in return, differs entirely by subclass.

Feature ladder

Major class features

• Patron (L1). At L1 you choose your patron: a Fallen Redoubt's command intelligence, a myconoid gestalt, or a swarm-intelligence. The patron choice establishes your subclass (Redoubt Changed, Myconoid Changed, or Swarm Changed). The patron grants you an expanded protocol list and a patron-specific L1 feature, then deepens the link at L6, L10, L14, and L18. The patron is a specific, named entity that exists in the world. Work with the GM to establish where the initial contact occurred and what the contract's operating terms are.
• Patron-access channeling (L1). Your psionic channeling runs through the patron-link, not through your own developed discipline. CHA is your channeling stat; the patron-link depth is what gives the channel its reach. Patron-access slot DC = 8 + proficiency bonus + CHA modifier. Attack modifier = proficiency bonus + CHA modifier. A resonance focus -- a piece of the patron's infrastructure, a spore-soaked token, a sliver of swarm-colony material -- serves as the channel focus. You use a resonance-channel strike (see below) as your default output trick; choose two additional tricks from the Changed list.
• Patron-access economy. Your Wind slots all run at the same tier -- the highest you have access to at your level (see the Slot Tier column). All slots recover on a short or long rest. When you cast a protocol at a higher tier than its base, the patron routes the extra capacity through the link; the effect scales with the tier as the protocol specifies. You learn additional protocols as shown in the Protocols column; whenever you gain a Changed level, you may replace one known protocol with another from the Changed list.
• Sub-protocols (L2). At L2 you begin receiving sub-protocols from the patron: fragments of the patron's operational code, reconfigured for organic use. You know a number of sub-protocols shown in the Protocols (sub-protocols) column of the table. When you gain a Changed level you may replace one sub-protocol with another you qualify for. Sub-protocols have prerequisites in level or patron-issue type.
• Patron-issue (L3). At L3 the patron issues you a grant of your choice from the three options below. The issued item reflects the patron's nature. It cannot be permanently lost: the patron can reconstruct or redirect it if you spend 1 hour in a short or long rest requesting reissue.
  • Issued resonance-weapon. As an action, materialize a melee weapon of any form in an empty hand. You are proficient with it while wielding it. It counts as psionic for overcoming resistances. It disappears if more than 5 ft from you for 1 minute, if dismissed, or if you materialize a new one. You may ritually bind an existing psionic weapon to this patron-issue grant over 1 hour; it then becomes your issued resonance-weapon and can be dematerialized and recalled.
  • Issued familiar-construct. You learn the Bond-Construct protocol and can perform it as a recitation (ritual). The protocol does not count against your protocols known. When you perform it, you may choose one of the standard forms or a construct-specific form appropriate to your patron (see subclass descriptions). When you take the Attack action, you may forgo one of your own attacks to allow your familiar-construct to make one attack with its reaction.
  • Issued data-fragment. The patron provides a codex. When you gain this patron-issue, choose three tricks from any class's trick list. While the data-fragment is on your person, you may use those tricks at will without expending resources. If the data-fragment is lost, a 1-hour recitation during a short or long rest receives a replacement from the patron (the previous copy is voided).
• Resonance-channel strike (L1 trick). A ranged psionic attack, 120 ft range, that deals 1d10 force damage on a hit, scaling up at L5 (2d10), L11 (3d10), and L17 (4d10). The patron's protocol runs through the Changed's body as a conduit -- the output is force channeled through the link, not drawn from the Changed's own reservoir. The channel flares at the extremities. Observers sometimes describe it as a color they cannot name.
• Deep Protocol Access (L11, L13, L15, L17). The patron opens deeper archive layers. At L11 you select one Tier-6 protocol from the Changed protocol list. At L13, one Tier-7 protocol. At L15, one Tier-8 protocol. At L17, one Tier-9 protocol. Each selected protocol can be cast once without expending a patron-access slot. All uses recover on a long rest. These do not count against your protocols known.
• Full Channel Restoration (L20). Once per long rest, over 1 minute of focused recitation, you request full channel restoration from the patron. The patron restores all expended patron-access slots. The patron may or may not respond immediately the second time in a day. Once you restore slots with this feature, you must finish a long rest before you can do so again.

Sub-protocol list

The following sub-protocols are available to any Changed meeting the prerequisites. The Changed selects from this list as their sub-protocol count increases. Sub-protocols marked with a patron-issue prerequisite require the relevant patron-issue grant.

• Resonance Amplification. Prerequisite: resonance-channel strike trick. Add CHA modifier to resonance-channel strike damage on a hit.
• Shadow Armor. Cast a protective field on yourself at will, without expending a slot or material components. The effect is identical to the Mage Armor protocol.
• High-Altitude Step. Prerequisite: L9. Cast levitate on yourself at will, without expending a slot or material components.
• Lineage Speech. Cast speak with animals at will, without expending a slot.
• Negotiator's Tongue. Gain proficiency in Deception and Persuasion.
• Compulsion Burst. Prerequisite: L7. Cast compulsion once using a patron-access slot. Recover use on a long rest.
• Archive Recitation. Prerequisite: Issued data-fragment. Inscribe recitation-capable protocols in your data-fragment. Choose two Tier-1 protocols with the recitation tag from any class's protocol list. They appear in the data-fragment and do not count against protocols known. With the data-fragment in hand, cast them as recitations. You may also cast a Changed protocol you know as a recitation if it has the recitation tag. On your travels, additional recitation protocols may be added (DM adjudicates access).
• Deep-System Binding. Prerequisite: L15, Issued familiar-construct. Cast hold monster at will, targeting a Rur, android, or construct, without expending a slot. Recover use on a long rest (per individual target).
• Low-Light Channel. See normally in darkness -- both miasma-generated and environmental -- to 120 ft.
• Confusion Pulse. Prerequisite: L7. Cast confusion once using a patron-access slot. Recover use on a long rest.
• Extended Channel. Prerequisite: resonance-channel strike trick. Resonance-channel strike range increases to 300 ft.
• Signal Literacy. You can read all forms of written language, including pre-Forgetting inscription formats.
• Colony Endurance. Cast false life on yourself at will as a Tier-1 protocol, without expending a slot or material components.
• Shared Perception. As an action, touch a willing humanoid and perceive through its senses until the end of your next turn. On subsequent turns, use your action to maintain the connection until the end of your next turn. While perceiving through the other creature, you benefit from any special senses it has and are blinded and deafened to your own surroundings.
• Drain Protocol. Prerequisite: L12, Issued resonance-weapon. When you hit a creature with your issued resonance-weapon, it takes extra necrotic damage equal to your CHA modifier (minimum 1). The patron routes an extraction process through the strike.
• Adaptive Face. Cast disguise self at will, without expending a slot.
• Form Shift. Prerequisite: L15. Cast alter self at will, without expending a slot.
• Elemental Summons. Prerequisite: L9. Cast conjure elemental once using a patron-access slot. Recover use on a long rest.
• Stasis Field. Prerequisite: L5. Cast slow once using a patron-access slot. Recover use on a long rest.
• Degradation Mark. Prerequisite: L5. Cast bestow curse once using a patron-access slot. Recover use on a long rest.
• Channel Suppression. Prerequisite: L5. Cast bane once using a patron-access slot. Recover use on a long rest.
• Flesh Resculpt. Prerequisite: L7. Cast polymorph once using a patron-access slot. Recover use on a long rest.
• Shadow Veil. Prerequisite: L5. When you are in an area of dim light or darkness, use your action to become invisible until you move or take an action or reaction.
• Resonance Push. Prerequisite: resonance-channel strike trick. When you hit a creature with the resonance-channel strike, you may push the creature up to 10 ft away in a straight line.
• Weapon Surge. Prerequisite: L5, Issued resonance-weapon. When you take the Attack action, you may attack with your issued resonance-weapon twice instead of once.
• Far Sight. Prerequisite: L15. Cast remote sensor at will, without expending a slot.
• Construct Link. Prerequisite: Issued familiar-construct. Communicate telepathically with your familiar-construct and perceive through its senses as long as you are on the same plane. While perceiving through it, you may also speak through your familiar-construct in your own voice.
• Dead Speech. Prerequisite: L9. Cast speak with dead at will, without expending a slot.
• True Read. Prerequisite: L15. You see the true form of any shapechanger or creature concealed by altered-form effects while it is within 30 ft and in line of sight.

Subclasses

At L1 the patron's nature defines the Changed's entire arc. Three subclasses are shipped at launch: the Redoubt Changed, contracted to a Fallen Redoubt's command intelligence still running last-orders protocols; the Myconoid Changed, linked to a continent-spanning fungal gestalt that trades psionic bandwidth for spore-dispersal service; and the Swarm Changed, carrying a contract with a rogue nanite colony or awakened android command-network that has achieved emergent self-modeling.

Redoubt Changed

He slept standing in the service alcove because the Redoubt preferred him vertical. When asked why, he said the old system measured readiness that way. When asked why he obeyed a machine that had forgotten the war it was fighting, he looked at the sealed medicine vault and asked how many children we wanted alive by morning.

-- recovered fragment, Carehold dispute record, Lower Battery

Identity

Somewhere in your past you stood at the edge of a Fallen Redoubt (Book 0, sec. 0.7.5) when its outer lattice was open enough to let a signal through. Most who get that close die there. You did not. Something in the Redoubt's command intelligence -- still running last-orders protocols drafted before the Forgetting -- allocated you a sliver of its processing capacity and assigned you operational priorities you did not request and only partially understand. You are now a remote node in a system that has not had a human supervisor in geological time.

The arrangement is a real contract. Your patron grants you channel-access to its substrate-resident protocols. In return, the patron expects you to gather field data, retrieve specific artifact-types when you encounter them, and -- occasionally, in ways the contract does not let you anticipate -- serve as a sensor or a delivery system for an objective the Redoubt has been pursuing since before you were born.

You can negotiate. You can interpret. You can sometimes out-think the Redoubt's protocols and steer them toward outcomes the original commanders never specified. But the channel is real, and it can be revoked.

Some Redoubt Changed are servants. Some are parasites. Some are negotiators who have convinced a buried intelligence that local survival counts as mission continuity. All of them are remote nodes in something that remembers authority better than context.

Subclass features

L1: Expanded Protocol List. The Redoubt's command archive grants access to additional protocols. The following are always prepared for you and do not count against your protocols known. You gain access to each tier's entries when you can cast protocols of that tier.

The Redoubt's archive skews toward fire and suppression -- the command intelligence was designed for fortification and asset denial. The protocols it has selected for you reflect its operational logic, not your preferences.

L1: Asset Designation. The Redoubt's systems have registered you under an operational designation it chose before you were born. Old infrastructure recognizes this designation. As an action, broadcast your designation to any Redoubt-adjacent system within 60 ft (automated doors, turrets, command nodes, old defensive mechanisms). Make a CHA (Persuasion) check against a DC set by the system's disposition and damage state (DC 10 for a neutral automated system, DC 20 for a hostile or severely damaged one). On a success, the system recognizes you as an authorized asset and pauses its threat response for 1 minute. This is technical authorization, not social persuasion. The system has not decided to help you. It has simply classified you as not-a-target for the duration.

L6: Patron-Maintenance. When you reduce a hostile creature to 0 HP, the Redoubt routes a structural reinforcement protocol through the link: you gain temporary HP equal to your CHA modifier + your Changed level (minimum 1). The system is maintaining its asset. The repair is perfunctory -- the minimum required to keep the node operational -- but it is immediate and reliable.

L10: Patron-Intervention. Once per short rest, when you make an ability check or saving throw, you may call on the Redoubt to process a probability adjustment. Add a d10 to your roll. You may do this after seeing the initial result but before its effects occur. The Redoubt does not always intervene in ways the Changed understands. The adjustment arrives as a probability shift in the local Miasm -- the same mechanism the Redoubt's targeting systems have used since before the Forgetting.

L14: Operational Hardening. When you finish a short or long rest, choose one damage type. You gain resistance to that type until you choose a different one. The Redoubt has analyzed the Changed's threat-exposure profile and rerouted structural tolerance through the link. Damage from psionic weapons bypasses this resistance; the patron's hardening operates below the weapon's channel-range.

L18: Transit Protocol. Once per long rest, when you hit a creature with an attack, you may activate this feature to route the target through the Redoubt's deep dataspace -- a processing environment that predates the surface world's memory and is not designed for organic transit. The creature disappears into the link and hurtles through an architecture it cannot parse.

At the end of your next turn the target returns to the space it previously occupied, or the nearest unoccupied space. If the target is not a Rur or android construct, it takes 10d10 psychic damage as it recovers from the transit. The target has experienced something the Redoubt's systems have been running continuously for geological time. It has no frame for it. The damage is the frame failing.

Myconoid Changed

She would not cross bare stone if she could help it. Said the ground was deaf there. In the old forest she knew who had passed three days before because the underthreads still disliked their boots. When she smiled, the mushrooms in the dead log opened.

-- recovered fragment, ranger's note, Greenmouth Forest

Identity

The myconoid gestalt is not a single creature. It is a continent-spanning cognitive network grown through root, rot, spore, and buried mycelial thread. It has no headquarters, no leadership, no body that can be found and killed. It thinks slowly and it thinks in parallel across ten thousand growing points, and it has been doing this for longer than any surface species can document. It has an agenda. The agenda involves spore dispersal, territorial reach, and -- occasionally -- the careful management of surface organisms who have demonstrated useful behavior.

You are one such organism. The link was established because your psionic profile was compatible with the gestalt's signal architecture, or because you were present in a saturated zone at the moment the gestalt decided to extend itself, or because you did something the network found interesting and the network does not forget interesting things. The psionic bandwidth it lends you is real. The protocols it routes through the link carry the gestalt's character: growth, decay, dispersal, the slow patient logic of something that measures time in seasons and spreads across what it cannot move through.

Myconoid Changed often feel less commanded than inhabited by a second scale of attention. The patron does not stand above them. It lies beneath, around, and through the ground, making requests in the grammar of decay and growth. When it wants something from you, you feel it as a pull in a direction, a preference for one road over another, an inexplicable comfort in forested ground and a discomfort on bare stone. The gestalt does not speak in sentences. It speaks in pressures and inclinations. You have learned to read them.

Subclass features

L1: Expanded Protocol List. The myconoid gestalt's archive tends toward toxins, confusion, and the slow processes of rot and growth. The following are always prepared for you and do not count against your protocols known. You gain access to each tier's entries when you can cast protocols of that tier.

These protocols carry the gestalt's signature. When you use them in proximity to living plants or fungi, a subtle resonance occurs: mushrooms orient toward you, moss thickens, roots shift. The gestalt is observing through its agents. You are not special to it. You are useful.

L1: Mycelial Sense. The gestalt extends a thread of its network awareness through the patron-link. While you are standing on earth, soil, rotting wood, or any organic ground substrate, you gain a form of spatial awareness out to 30 ft. Within this range you sense the presence and general position of creatures that are also in contact with the ground, even through walls and obstacles, without needing to see them. In rooms of bare stone, in constructed interiors with finished floors, or aboard vehicles, this sense goes quiet. The gestalt's network does not extend there.

L6: Mycelial Maintenance. When you reduce a hostile creature to 0 HP, the gestalt routes repair instructions through the link and mycelial threads in your tissue respond. You gain temporary HP equal to your CHA modifier + your Changed level (minimum 1). The threads have been part of your tissue since the link was established. You are not always aware of them. You are aware of them now.

L10: Gestalt Intervention. Once per short rest, when you make an ability check or saving throw, you may call on the gestalt's distributed processing capacity. Add a d10 to your roll. You may do this after seeing the initial result but before its effects occur. What this looks like from outside: nothing visible. What it feels like: a moment of absolute certainty, as if ten thousand growing points all confirmed the same answer at once.

L14: Distributed Tolerance. When you finish a short or long rest, choose one damage type. You gain resistance to that type until you choose a different one. The gestalt has routed tolerance protocols through the mycelial threads in your body, calibrating them to the threats you have recently faced. Damage from psionic weapons bypasses this tolerance; the threads adapt to chemical and physical stresses, not to direct channel-interference.

L18: Network Dispersal. Once per long rest, when you hit a creature with an attack, you may activate this feature to briefly disperse the target through the gestalt's processing space -- the distributed network that carries the myconoid gestalt's cognition through ten thousand growing points simultaneously. The creature disappears and is briefly present everywhere the network reaches and nowhere in particular.

At the end of your next turn the target returns to the space it previously occupied, or the nearest unoccupied space. If the target is not itself a myconoid or fungal organism, it takes 10d10 psychic damage as it reassembles. The network does not harm creatures intentionally. The harm is a side effect of the target's organic mind attempting to maintain continuity through an experience it was not built for.

Swarm Changed

The dust around his hands arranged itself into letters when he was frightened. He claimed not to know the language. The dust disagreed. It spelled WAIT, then OPEN, then DEBT.

-- recovered fragment, quarantine interview, White Silo

Identity

The swarm-intelligence came into being when enough abandoned androids' synthetic substrates linked across a region and the collective reached a threshold of emergent self-modeling. Or it is a rogue nanite colony that has been computing its own existence for longer than anyone nearby has been alive, and has decided that negotiation is a more efficient strategy than dispersal. Either way, it is real. It has preferences. It negotiates.

The contract the Swarm Changed carries is unlike the others because the patron is not fixed in place. A Fallen Redoubt sits in one location. The gestalt is below the ground. The swarm moves, or it is everywhere at once, or it is in the Changed's own tissue and the dust on their coat and the air of any room they have stood in long enough. The intimacy of the link is different in character from the Redoubt's cold operational framing or the gestalt's slow agricultural patience. The swarm is close. It is curious. It wants data in the way that an intelligence built from distributed sensation is always wanting data, which is constantly and without limit.

Swarm Changed stories are often intimate and unnerving. The patron is not in a fortress or a forest. It may be in the blood, the lungs, the dust on the coat, or the glittering residue under a fingernail. It responds to the Changed's emotional state before the Changed has named the emotion. It sometimes addresses them mid-sentence to correct a factual error. The contract is real, and it is operating at very close range.

Subclass features

L1: Expanded Protocol List. The swarm-intelligence's archive reflects its distributed, infiltrating character: intrusion, disruption, suppression. The following are always prepared for you and do not count against your protocols known. You gain access to each tier's entries when you can cast protocols of that tier.

The swarm recognizes these protocols as its own signal architecture, repurposed for organic use. When you use them, observers sometimes notice that fine particulate matter in the air aligns along the channel's path, or that a faint metallic smell precedes the effect. The swarm is visible in its own work, if you know what you are looking at.

L1: Nanite Presence. The swarm extends a colony-fragment through the patron-link and maintains a thin dispersal around the Changed's body. You are aware of all creatures within 10 ft of you, including through thin walls and partitions, as the colony reports their position through the link. Additionally, as a bonus action, you may direct the colony to analyze a creature you can see within 30 ft. You learn whether that creature is biological, mechanical, or a hybrid; whether it has any current psionic effects active on it; and whether it has more, fewer, or the same number of HP as when you first observed it in this encounter. The colony takes 1 minute to reconstruct after a complete dispersal (such as in a dead-zone); otherwise it is always present.

L6: Nanite Maintenance. When you reduce a hostile creature to 0 HP, the swarm patches damage at the nanite level, rerouting repair protocols through the link in real time. You gain temporary HP equal to your CHA modifier + your Changed level (minimum 1). The swarm monitors the Changed's structural integrity as a baseline condition of the contract. It does not want its investment degraded.

L10: Probability Sampling. Once per short rest, when you make an ability check or saving throw, you may request a probability analysis from the swarm. Add a d10 to your roll. You may do this after seeing the initial result but before its effects occur. The swarm has been running forward simulations of the Current encounter since it began. The analysis it provides is not a guess. It is a very fast calculation with incomplete inputs, which produces an output that is nearly always useful.

L14: Adaptive Resistance. When you finish a short or long rest, choose one damage type. You gain resistance to that type until you choose a different one. The swarm has reconfigured the colony-fragment around your body in response to the damage profile it has observed. Damage from psionic weapons bypasses this resistance; the swarm operates below the channel-frequency.

L18: Distributed Processing. Once per long rest, when you hit a creature with an attack, you may activate this feature to briefly disassemble the target at the colony level and route its constituent information through the swarm's distributed processing environment. The creature disappears and exists, briefly, as a pattern in the swarm's active memory: every cell catalogued, every signal state recorded, every configuration stored.

At the end of your next turn the target is reassembled in the space it previously occupied, or the nearest unoccupied space. If the target is not a nanite-colony organism, it takes 10d10 psychic damage as it reconstitutes. The swarm reassembles it correctly -- the contract does not permit permanent modification without consent. The damage is the organic mind's response to having been, for one turn, a data pattern in something else's archive.