The Wakeful
All sorts of monsters love to gobble up adventurers, a possibility that most players have tried to avoid. Most try to make their character too fearsome to be worth the trouble to kill, or else too sneaky to be worth the trouble to hunt down, but what if monsters never wanted to eat you in the first place? What if there just wasn't enough meat on your bones to be satisfying to the average famished owlbear?
What if you were only bones?
Now, with our new skeletal player race, you can find out. The wakeful have all the calcium of a classic skeleton, with none of the necromancy, guaranteed!
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The Wakeful
Skinless, meatless, and ever grinning, the wakeful are perhaps the least dangerous product of necromancy known, despite their macabre appearance. Though stories of their origins vary, it is known that these ageless skeletal humanoids have no particular antipathy toward the living, at least in part because they only appear to be truly undead. The wakeful are the animated bones of the dead, but they still possess souls and have no memory of their former lives. In fact, the forces that animate them are unconnected to the souls that their bones once contained; the wakeful are newly born creatures in second-hand bodies.
Ivory Decorators
While they simply appear as reanimated undead skeletons, the wakeful are closer to constructs in nature and do their best to differentiate themselves from mindless undead in obvious ways. Nearly all wakeful thoroughly decorate their bodies, carving and painting their bones and embedding or hanging stones or charms from various places about their frame. Many weave and dangle ribbons and other trinkets through their ribcage or drape scarves and other fabrics around and through their bodies in ways impossible for other creatures. Some prefer simplicity, but even the most sparsely ‘dressed’ wakeful will customarily have distinguishing markings on their skull. Some will carve glyphs while others may paint abstract or animalistic motifs, but every wakeful strives to be recognizable by these unique designs. Many will be named based upon the markings they choose, and nearly all are meaningful to the particular wakeful in some way.
Tireless Devotion
Every wakeful is an enthusiastic hobbyist of some sort. With no bodily needs or known maximum lifespan, the wakeful are always in search of new things to entertain themselves, even while already humerus-deep in one pastime or another. Many of the achievements of the wakeful are due less to great ambition than to pure tenacity and time. Once a wakeful settles into a task, they rarely stray from it until it is completed or it begins to bore them, which has been known in some cases to take decades. For instance, many wakeful who take a liking to reading become librarians simply by virtue of possessing a great number of books, their tireless collecting and sharing of texts as the years surmount earning them a reputation as a keeper of knowledge. Eventually, others begin to call their steadily-expanding collection a library, perhaps without the wakeful even noticing. Wakeful artisans and scholars are often masters of their craft or fields simply due to the length of their experience.
Tenacious Bones
The wakeful are a very hardy race, as they lack the biology most infirmities affect. In addition, the magic that animates a wakeful’s body is stubborn, slowly reassembling the wakeful’s body over time even if entire bones are lost or destroyed. The worse the damage to a wakeful, the longer their bones may take to repair themselves, but there is no known mundane or magical way to permanently destroy a wakeful. Even when disassembled or crushed into powder, the bones of a wakeful inexorably return to each other and reform themselves. This process can take years, decades, even centuries, and can lead to other unpredictable effects on the disassembled wakeful such as memory loss or dramatic personality shifts. As such, wakeful are as wary of injury as any other race, even with their unusual resistance to permanent harm.
Wakeful Names
The wakeful have a rather loose relationship with names. They are very aware that they have already forgotten at least one name, that of their bones’ original owner, as well as the names they had in centuries past. As such, the wakeful are fond of letting other races give them monikers circumstantially or using a suite of similar pseudonyms. When names are so easily lost, they lose the value that they carry with other races.
If a wakeful does choose their own name, they often choose something easy to remember. Some of these names may be vocational, Smith, Carver, and the like, or even the name of a historical figure that the wakeful admired or met. Many of these historical names are chosen regardless of how well remembered the figure is, or how ‘appropriate’ they may be, leading to female-presenting wakeful with the guttural names of ancient orcish warrior poets, or quiet wakeful librarians with the opaque names of their favorite kenku historians.
Wakeful Traits
Your wakeful character has the following traits.
Ability Score Increase. Your Constitution score increases by 1.
Age. The wakeful first appeared millennia ago, and have no known maximum lifespan. Few remember that far back, however; due to one calamity or another, most wakeful can trace their history at most to a few centuries back. Young wakeful are extremely rare.
Alignment. Wakeful are generally peaceful, lacking the glands that make living people so upset, and so they tend toward neutral alignments. While some develop stronger opinions or convictions, these wakeful are rare.
Size. Wakeful are the height of whatever creature their bones formerly belonged to, if a little shorter without the meat. While larger and smaller exceptions do exist, the vast majority of wakeful are size Medium.
Speed. You have a base walking speed of 30 feet.
Constructed Resilience. Your body is durable and low-maintenance, represented by the following benefits:
You have advantage on saving throws against being poisoned or exhausted, and you have resistance to poison damage.
You don’t need to eat, drink, or breathe.
You are immune to disease.
You don't need to sleep, and magic can't put you to sleep.
Falling Apart. When you take a long rest, you must spend at least 6 hours in a relaxed, resting state instead of sleeping. When you enter this state, you relax the force that holds your bones together, allowing them to fall into a pile. This pile is considered one size smaller than you are normally, and appears inert. You can see and hear as normal while resting, and are not rendered unconscious by resting in this way. You can enter this disassembled state outside of a rest as an action, and can remain in this state until you choose to reassemble. As an action, you can begin to reassemble, a process that takes one round. At the start of your next turn, you return to your normal, humanoid shape.
Reassembler. Your skeletal body stubbornly refuses to be permanently destroyed. Broken or lost bones return to you and slowly repair themselves. You have advantage on death saving throws, and when you roll a 20 on a death saving throw, you regain extra hit points equal to your level. However, a DC 16 Wisdom (Medicine) check is needed to stabilize you. If you would die, instead, your spirit falls dormant, rendering your body inert for 5d6 x 10 years.
Languages. You speak, read, and write Common, and know Catacomb Rattle, the language of the wakeful. ‘Comb Rattle is a language composed partly of gestures and partly of percussion on parts of one’s own body, and is very difficult for any creature without exposed bone to replicate accurately.
Subrace. The wakeful have taken up many different crafts over the years, and have learned to adapt in creative ways to their chosen roles. As a result, wakeful can be difficult to categorize, but a few of the more iconic variations are presented here; the grinning skulldugger, the catacomb scholar, and the ivory dilettante.
Grinning Skulldugger
While typically peaceful, to call the wakeful generally law-abiding would be inaccurate. Those who involve themselves in current events often find that laws and customs shift so rapidly from their perspective that keeping track of what is legal and what is crime is simply too much trouble. Wakeful crime is not typically greedy or cruel, but the old secrets and hidden places that grinning skullduggers wish to explore demand a particular set of skills, making them adept thieves, spies, and smugglers.
Ability Score Increase. Your Dexterity score increases by 2.
Vertebral Dirk. Your lowest pair of ribs have been modified with metal reinforcement, allowing you to use them as weapons. You can draw either or both of these ribs from your body as you would draw a weapon, and they each act identically to a normal dagger. If they are ever thrown or lost, they return to you on their own and reattach to your ribcage after 1 minute.
Graveyard Whisper. Years of subtle dealings and hidden business have taught you to communicate quietly with magic. You know the message cantrip. In addition, you have embedded a copper wire onto the inside of your skull, meaning you are never without the cantrip’s material component. When you cast message, if the target replies to you, the reply returns with an echoey quality but otherwise works normally.
Catacomb Scholar
Many wakeful are fascinated by history and record keeping, and their long lives and memories make them especially well-equipped to maintain the annals of history accurately. Scholarly wakeful also make excellent translators and researchers, as a catacomb scholar may simply remember many dialects and texts that have been lost to the more fleeting races.
Ability Score Increase. Your Intelligence score increases by 2.
Ageless Cataloguer. You have spent decades, or even centuries, studying the writings and literature of the world. You gain proficiency with one of the following skills: Arcana, History, Nature, or Religion. You also have advantage on any Intelligence (Investigation) check made to find or search through written documents, and advantage on any check to identify written languages, handwriting, or other written details. In addition, you can speak, read, and write two extra languages of your choice.
Midnight Oil. To accommodate your many hours spent reading in the dark, you have built a small lantern into your ribcage. This lantern is built into the side of your ribs, and doesn’t occupy your hands or impede your movement. Otherwise, it functions like a normal hooded lantern.
Ivory Dilettante
While many wakeful devote themselves to a particular interest, some believe that no one pastime could ever satisfy a potentially endless life. As such, some wakeful dabble endlessly, acquiring a little bit of experience in many fields and subjects over the course of many years. Ivory dilettante pride themselves on knowing a little something about almost everything, and are always on the lookout for new talents, crafts and skills to practice.
Ability Score Increase. Your Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma scores each increase by 1.
Skeleton for All Occasions. You have an array of skills and talents useful in a variety of circumstances. You gain proficiency with one skill, one weapon, one set of artisan’s tools, one musical instrument, and one gaming set of your choice. You also know how to speak, read, and write one extra language of your choice.
World-Wise. Your diverse experience and breadth of travel has taught you to pick up on the skills of others in subtle ways. After interacting with or observing another humanoid for at least 1 minute, you can tell the following:
If they are proficient with any, all, or no martial weapons.
If they can cast any spells.
If they are native to or foreign to this plane of existence.
A creature that wishes to hide these details about themselves can hide any or all of this information from you with a successful Charisma (Deception) check contested by your Wisdom (Insight) check. The target is immune to this effect for the next 24 hours.
Printer-Safe: