Shifter
The child saw the marsh-cat once. Once was enough. By moonrise her hands had shortened, her shoulders had dropped, and her eyes caught the reed-light the way the marsh-cat's had. Her mother sat beside her through the fever and named each change without fear. Claw. Hock. Jaw. Breath. By morning the girl was herself again and could smell frogs through mud.
-- recovered fragment, wetland midwife's notes, Reed Nine
What a Shifter is
A Shifter carries a heritable template buffer. Their cells can observe a living pattern, hold it, and temporarily reshape the body through miasma-sourced energy and pattern-data. The change is not worship of the wilderness and not a compact with anything outside the natural world. It is biology that learned to keep options open.
Shifters are rare because the capacity is not merely trained. A teacher can refine it, but cannot give it to a body without the buffer. Families that carry the trait often live close to deep ecologies where the Miasm is rich, strange, and full of usable forms. The ability comes in with the bloodline; the practice comes in with the years.
A Shifter learns a place by letting the place enter the body. Tracks, calls, scents, gait, lung, claw, shell, wing, and hide are all information. Reading the full PFM complex of an organism — its nanites, picites, femtites, biochemical signals, and Wind signature together — is what the surface world calls reading the Substrate, and it is what the Shifter does when they stand still at the edge of a territory and let the place tell them what it knows. The danger is that information can pull. The best Shifters return from the borrowed body with more than instinct and less than surrender.
The template buffer activates from the first level of practice. A Shifter can attempt a mutational metamorphosis as soon as they understand what the buffer does. The class is named for this trick, and the trick is available at the door. The forms available deepen over a career, but the capacity is not a later development — it is the thing the lineage already carries, waiting for the first occasion.
Alongside the metamorphosis, Shifters channel Wind through the same substrate-reading that gives them their forms. Where a Sage narrows the channel through faction discipline and a Mage codes it into a technique-codex, the Shifter channels through the accumulated pattern-data of plant and animal lineages that have spent geological ages co-evolving with the Miasm. The protocols a Shifter prepares draw from those lineages. The Wind save DC is WIS-based: the Shifter's clarity of substrate-read translates directly into channeling power.
Chassis
| Hit Die | d8 |
|---|---|
| Primary stat | WIS (substrate-sense as channeling clarity) |
| Saves | INT and WIS |
| Armor | Light armor, medium armor, shields (not metal armor or metal shields) |
| Weapons | Clubs, daggers, darts, javelins, quarterstaffs, scimitars, sickles, slings, spears |
| Tools | Herbalism kit |
| Skills | Two from: Animal Handling, Insight, Medicine, Nature, Perception, Survival |
| Subclass level | 2 (the practice roots in a mode) |
Class features
The Shifter's class features are the working infrastructure of the lineage regardless of which path the character's practice takes. They are the metamorphosis, the substrate-read, the Wind channel, and the long cellular resilience that builds slowly over a career spent in close contact with the Miasm. The subclass sharpens and focuses what the chassis has already built.
Feature ladder
| L | Tricks Known | 1st | 2nd | 3rd | 4th | 5th | 6th | 7th | 8th | 9th | Features |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | 2 | 2 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | Substrate-Read, Psionic Channeling, Mutational Metamorphosis |
| 2 | 2 | 3 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | Subclass; Subclass features |
| 3 | 2 | 4 | 2 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- |
| 4 | 3 | 4 | 3 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | ASI; Metamorphosis improvement (CR 1/2, no fly) |
| 5 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 2 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- |
| 6 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 3 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | Subclass feature |
| 7 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 1 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- |
| 8 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 2 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- | ASI; Metamorphosis improvement (CR 1, swim allowed) |
| 9 | 3 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 1 | -- | -- | -- | -- | -- |
| 10 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | -- | -- | -- | -- | Subclass feature |
| 11 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | -- | -- | -- | -- |
| 12 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | -- | -- | -- | ASI |
| 13 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | -- | -- | -- |
| 14 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | -- | -- | Subclass feature |
| 15 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | -- | -- |
| 16 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | -- | ASI |
| 17 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | -- |
| 18 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 1 | 1 | 1 | 1 | Cellular Maintenance, Pattern Channeling |
| 19 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 1 | 1 | 1 | ASI |
| 20 | 4 | 4 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 3 | 2 | 2 | 1 | 1 | Unlimited Metamorphosis |
Major class features
- Substrate-Read (L1). You can read the full PFM complex of living organisms around you — their nanites, picites, femtites, biochemical signals, and Wind signature together. This is the language the Shifter uses to absorb templates and to channel through lineages. In practice it functions as the substrate-sense WIS governs: the world tells you what it is, and you have learned to listen. You also know a simple pattern-language — a set of subtle marks, calls, and substrate-encoded signals only other Shifters read fluently. Others may detect the marks exist; only those trained in this lineage-language can interpret them without a successful WIS (Perception) check.
- Psionic Channeling (L1). Your substrate-reading opens a Wind channel. WIS governs the channel. You know two tricks from the Shifter protocol list and may use them freely. You prepare a list of protocols (spells) equal to your WIS modifier + your Shifter level (minimum 1), choosing from the Shifter protocol list. The list may be changed when you finish a long rest; changing requires 1 minute per tier of preparation. Wind save DC: 8 + proficiency bonus + WIS modifier. Channel attack modifier: proficiency bonus + WIS modifier. A resonance focus — a length of local wood, a worked bone, a piece of substrate-rich material from your home ecology — serves as the channel anchor. You may also channel protocols as recitations (rituals) if the protocol carries that designation and you have it prepared.
- Mutational Metamorphosis (L1). As an action, you draw on the template buffer and reshape your body into a local fauna template you have absorbed by observation. You can do this twice, regaining uses on a short or long rest. The forms available deepen as the character grows; see the Template Tiers table. You may remain in a template form for a number of hours equal to half your Shifter level (round down, minimum 1 hour), then revert unless you expend another use. As a bonus action you may revert early. You revert automatically if you fall unconscious, drop to 0 HP, or are killed. While in template form: your statistics are replaced by the template creature's, but you retain your alignment, personality, and INT, WIS, and CHA scores, plus all your skill and save proficiencies (using whichever bonus is higher for overlapping proficiencies). You assume the template's HP and Hit Dice; on reverting you return to your prior HP total (excess damage carries over to your normal form). You cannot channel protocols while in template form (see Pattern Channeling at L18), but concentration on a protocol already active is not broken by the transformation. You retain class features and can use them if the form allows. You choose whether equipment falls to the ground, merges into the form, or is worn by it.
- Template Tiers (L1, L4, L8). The complexity of the templates you can hold increases with practice:
- L1: Templates with CR 1/4 or lower; no fly or swim speed.
- L4: Templates with CR 1/2 or lower; no fly speed.
- L8: Templates with CR 1 or lower; all movement modes permitted.
- ASI (L4, L8, L12, L16, L19). Increase one ability score by 2, or two ability scores by 1. Cannot exceed 20 by this means.
- Cellular Maintenance (L18). The sustained substrate-resident nanite activity in your tissue, shaped over decades of co-evolution with the Miasm, now handles its own upkeep. For every 10 years that pass, your body ages only 1 year. This is not a channeled effect; it does not shut off in dead zones. The colonies maintain themselves at rates the younger body could not sustain.
- Pattern Channeling (L18). You can now maintain psionic channeling while in metamorphosis form. You may perform the vocal and somatic components of a Shifter protocol while in a template shape; you cannot provide material components that require hands your form does not have.
- Unlimited Metamorphosis (L20). You can use Mutational Metamorphosis an unlimited number of times. In addition, you can ignore the vocal and somatic components of your Shifter protocols, as well as material components that have no cost and are not consumed. This applies in both normal form and template form.
Subclasses
At L2 a Shifter's template practice roots in a mode of adaptation: the Shifter of the Land bonded to a biome and its deep substrate-ecology, the Shifter of the Beast who masters one apex animal to the bone, the Shifter of the Root who reads the slow substrate-currents of plant lineages, the Deep-Template who carries dangerous old forms in the buffer, or the Swarmkin who learns from many small bodies instead of one large one.
Shifter of the Land
She did not ask the forest for permission. She watched the branch-lizards for three days, ate what they ate, slept where they slept, and learned the angle of their feet. On the fourth day she climbed the rain-slick tower faster than rope.
-- recovered fragment, tower salvage account, Greenfall
Identity
The Shifter of the Land binds their practice to a biome: forest, coast, desert, marsh, mountain, grassland, arctic, ruin, or another ecology the World Master names. They do not own the place. They are tuned to it.
Such Shifters become local experts in the most bodily possible sense. They know what the land can teach a body and what the body should refuse to learn. The substrate-read that all Shifters carry becomes, for a Land Shifter, an ongoing dialogue with a specific ecology: the Miasm density shifts at dawn and at the watershed edge, the Wind signature of the old growth differs from the young scrub, the pattern-data in the deep-rooted organisms has accumulated across geological time while the surface tenure of any given creature is brief by comparison. A Land Shifter knows all of this not as scholarship but as body-knowledge, absorbed the way a person absorbs the layout of a room they have lived in for twenty years.
The Shifter of the Land's additional protocols are not chosen but absorbed. The terrain dictates them. The biome's miasma has held those patterns long enough that they are available with less expenditure than a Shifter not rooted here would find. This is why, after a short rest, a Land Shifter can recover Wind slots that others must sleep to restore: the local ecology is doing part of the work of replenishment.
Subclass features
L2: Bonus Trick. When you choose this path, you learn one additional trick from the Shifter protocol list. Your time reading the local Miasm has opened a trivial-channel that other Shifters spend longer to reach; the biome has already done the tuning.
L2: Natural Recovery. During a short rest, choose expended Wind slots to recover. The combined tier of the recovered slots may not exceed half your Shifter level (round up), and none of the slots may be 6th tier or higher. Once used, this feature is unavailable until you finish a long rest. The substrate-read of a Land Shifter at rest in their territory is not passive: the local organism-web cycles pattern-data through the body, and the Wind slots refill as a side effect of deep ecological attention. At a campfire in a desert ravine, eating what the desert grows, the Land Shifter is working even when still.
L2: Terrain Protocols. Choose one terrain type when you take this subclass: Arctic, Coast, Desert, Forest, Grassland, Mountain, Swamp, or Underdark. You gain access to the associated protocol list below; these protocols are always prepared and do not count against your prepared total. If a protocol does not appear on the Shifter protocol list, it is nonetheless a Shifter protocol for you. The terrain dictates the channel; you did not choose these protocols so much as absorb the patterns the terrain made available.
| Terrain | Shifter Level | Protocols |
|---|---|---|
| Arctic | 3 | Hold Person, Spike Growth |
| 5 | Sleet Storm, Slow | |
| 7 | Freedom of Movement, Ice Storm | |
| 9 | Commune with Nature, Cone of Cold | |
| Coast | 3 | Mirror Image, Misty Step |
| 5 | Water Breathing, Water Walk | |
| 7 | Control Water, Freedom of Movement | |
| 9 | Conjure Elemental, Scrying | |
| Desert | 3 | Blur, Silence |
| 5 | Create Food and Water, Protection from Energy | |
| 7 | Blight, Hallucinatory Terrain | |
| 9 | Insect Plague, Wall of Stone | |
| Forest | 3 | Barkskin, Spider Climb |
| 5 | Call Lightning, Plant Growth | |
| 7 | Divination, Freedom of Movement | |
| 9 | Commune with Nature, Tree Stride | |
| Grassland | 3 | Invisibility, Pass Without Trace |
| 5 | Daylight, Haste | |
| 7 | Divination, Freedom of Movement | |
| 9 | Dream, Insect Plague | |
| Mountain | 3 | Spider Climb, Spike Growth |
| 5 | Lightning Bolt, Meld into Stone | |
| 7 | Stone Shape, Stoneskin | |
| 9 | Passwall, Wall of Stone | |
| Swamp | 3 | Darkness, Acid Arrow |
| 5 | Stinking Cloud, Water Walk | |
| 7 | Freedom of Movement, Locate Creature | |
| 9 | Insect Plague, Scrying | |
| Underdark | 3 | Spider Climb, Web |
| 5 | Gaseous Form, Stinking Cloud | |
| 7 | Greater Invisibility, Stone Shape | |
| 9 | Cloudkill, Insect Plague |
L6: Land's Stride. Moving through nonmagical difficult terrain costs you no extra movement. You can pass through nonmagical plants without being slowed or damaged by thorns, spines, or similar hazards. In addition, you have advantage on saving throws against plants that have been manipulated by psionic effects to impede movement. The body tuned to a biome has learned the physical grammar of that terrain: the give in the marsh-grass, the angle of the broken scree, the spacing between root-shoulders. Nothing natural in this ecology can hold you.
L10: Nature's Ward. You are immune to disease and poison. You cannot be Charmed or Frightened by substrate-resident phenomena or by creature-form entities whose pattern-data reads as substrate-generated rather than cognitive in origin. The body that has spent a decade reading the local substrate-ecology is not surprised by it; a phantasm generated from local Miasm finds no gap in the pattern-buffer of a Shifter who already carries everything the place has to offer. The immunity is a side effect of deep biome integration. The place is in the body; the body does not yield to it again.
L14: Nature's Sanctuary. When a beast or plant creature attacks you, it must make a WIS save against your Wind save DC. On a failure, it must choose a different target, or the attack automatically misses. The creature is aware of the effect before it attacks. On a success, the creature is immune to this effect for 24 hours. The creature-form entities in your terrain have had too long to read your substrate-signature, and what they read there is themselves: a pattern continuous with the biome they already belong to. Most will not strike at a pattern that reads as kin unless compelled. This effect ends for a specific creature if you attack it or deal damage to it.
Shifter of the Beast
He had watched the same animal most of his life, a scarp-cat that denned above the quarry, and somewhere in the long watching the two of them traded something. He did not template the way the young ones do, a dozen shapes held loose and shallow and handed back by morning. He went into the one form the way a man goes home. When he came back out of it he kept the cat's eyes a while, and its stillness, and he watched the rest of us the way it would have.
-- recovered fragment, quarry-warden's account, Highscarp
Identity
The Shifter of the Beast binds their practice to a single apex animal rather than to a biome's whole roster. Where the Shifter of the Land grazes an ecology broadly, the Beast Shifter goes deep: one creature, observed for years, templated past the point most of the lineage ever reaches. The buffer holds that form cleaner, holds it longer, and holds it under punishment that would break a shallow shift. They do not borrow the body. They live in it.
Depth has a cost. A form learned that thoroughly leaves its grain in the Shifter who carries it, and the instincts run loud between shifts: the gait, the patience, the way of looking. Communities trust a Beast Shifter to stand in a doorway and not be moved. They watch them, too, the way you watch any animal you respect, because a body learned to the bone does not entirely let go of the one who learned it.
Subclass features
The Shifter of the Beast subclass features are in active design. The Identity and vignette above represent the shipped lore; mechanics are pending.
Shifter of the Root
We had given the gap up for lost when she walked into it and stopped walking. She set her feet down and did not pick them up again. By the time the raiders reached her she had gone the color of old bark, and her arms had opened into something between a hand and a thicket, and they cut her, and the cuts closed slower than a wound and faster than a season. She held the gap until dark. In the morning she pulled her feet out of the stone and was tired the way a field is tired.
-- recovered fragment, breach account, Fallow Gate
Identity
The Shifter of the Root binds their practice to plant lineages instead of animal ones. The template buffer, in most Shifters, was built to read fauna; flora runs on a slower and stranger substrate-current, and learning to read it is a discipline of its own that only this branch of the lineage manages. Where the Beast Shifter is edge and speed, the Root Shifter is patience made bodily: bark and heartwood, the slow closing of a wound, growth that anchors and growth that grasps.
A Root Shifter is not a fast answer to anything. They are the answer to a thing that has to be held: a gap in a wall, a wounded companion, a line that cannot be allowed to bend. Communities set them where the position has to keep. The plant forms do not leave a beast's habits behind them; what they leave is patience, and a way of measuring time in seasons that the people around them often find hard to talk to.
Subclass features
The Shifter of the Root subclass features are in active design. The Identity and vignette above represent the shipped lore; mechanics are pending.
Deep-Template
The thing she became had not walked above ground in any living memory. Its forelimbs folded wrong for daylight. Its throat clicked before it breathed. When she returned to herself she would not say where she had seen it. She only said the tunnels remembered more than we did.
-- recovered fragment, expedition testimony, Lower Redoubt fringe
Identity
The Deep-Template Shifter carries forms from buried ecologies, sealed warrens, extinct lineages, or creatures that should not still have usable patterns. Their gift is broader and more frightening than ordinary adaptation.
Communities value Deep-Templates when the expedition goes below. They fear them when the expedition returns, because some borrowed shapes leave habits behind.
Subclass features
The Deep-Template subclass features are in active design. The Identity and vignette above represent the shipped lore; mechanics are pending.
Swarmkin
We thought she had vanished until the wall began to move. A hundred small bodies came through the cracks, each carrying a scrap of her intent. When they gathered on the far side she stood up out of them shaking, laughing, and full of dust.
-- recovered fragment, lockhouse breach account, Old Mason Road
Identity
The Swarmkin learns from colonies, hives, shoals, broods, and distributed life. Their shifts may not always make one body better. Sometimes they make the self more numerous, more diffuse, or harder to trap.
A Swarmkin is unsettling because they challenge the ordinary boundary of a character. They are still a person. They have simply learned that many small bodies can solve problems one proud body cannot.
Subclass features
L2: Swarm Form. Your Mutational Metamorphosis can produce a swarm body rather than a single-creature template. When you enter swarm form you do not take a template creature's statistics; instead you retain your own Hit Points and use the following profile: AC 12 + your DEX modifier; speed 30 ft., climb 30 ft.; one melee attack using your proficiency bonus + your DEX modifier, dealing 2d6 damage of a type you choose permanently when you take this subclass (bludgeoning, piercing, or slashing, reflecting the colony); when you are Bloodied the damage drops to 1d6. Your swarm form damage increases as your practice deepens: 3d6 (1d6 Bloodied) at L4, and 4d6 (2d6 Bloodied) at L8. While in swarm form: you are immune to the Grappled, Restrained, and Prone conditions; you have resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage from nonmagical sources; you can move through any opening large enough for a Tiny creature and may occupy another creature's space; and you may Disengage as a bonus action. You cannot regain Hit Points or gain temporary Hit Points while in swarm form, except as granted by Scatter (L10). All other Mutational Metamorphosis rules apply — you revert on the normal conditions; concentration on an active protocol is not broken by the transformation. The body you become is still you. It has simply distributed itself into a form with different answers to the question of where you end.
L6: Split. While in swarm form, as a bonus action you may divide into two independent swarm bodies. Divide your current Hit Points evenly between them, rounding down on each half if your total is odd; the lost point is gone. Both bodies may move independently and occupy separate spaces. You have one action and one bonus action per turn in total; you distribute them between the two bodies however you choose. If the two bodies are ever more than 100 ft. apart, immediately designate one as primary. The other goes dormant: it retains its swarm properties (immune to Grappled, Restrained, and Prone; resistant to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing from nonmagical sources), can be targeted and damaged normally, but cannot act and provides you no perception. Damage dealt to a dormant body reduces your Hit Points as normal. When the bodies return within 100 ft. the dormant body reactivates immediately. To rejoin, expend a bonus action while both bodies are within 5 ft. of each other; the merged body has the combined remaining Hit Points of both halves. If one body is reduced to 0 HP those colony members are gone — you continue as the surviving body at its current Hit Points. If both bodies are reduced to 0 HP simultaneously, the colony first reforms into a single body at a location of your choice between the two positions, then you fall unconscious and become stable at 0 HP in your normal form. The colony does not disappear when the signal drops. It waits.
L10: Scatter. When you would be reduced to 0 HP while in swarm form, you may instead scatter — the colony disperses before the killing impact lands. You do not fall unconscious. Your turn ends immediately. On your next turn you reaggregate at any point within 30 ft. of the position where you scattered, regaining Hit Points equal to your proficiency bonus + your WIS modifier, and may then act normally. Once used, this feature is unavailable until you finish a short or long rest. The colony remembers the shape it was. It finds its way back.
L14: Colony Sweep. Once on each of your turns while in swarm form, you may use your bonus action to drive the colony outward in a coordinated wave. Choose any number of creatures within range: within 10 ft. of either body if you are split, or within 15 ft. of your body if you are consolidated. Each chosen creature must make a DEX saving throw against your Wind save DC, taking your full swarm damage dice on a failure and half on a success. This is not a strike at a single target. It is the colony deciding what the space around it is for.