Puppeteer

While practicing alone in your home, you've created the perfect combination of your own identity and the personality trying to get out.

Being a proficient performer has shown you the secrets to manipulating small crowds. While deep in combat or nonchalantly traveling through town, you are able to quickly engage your audience in a privatized display to single certain members out for your own pleasure. While building up to the apex of the act, you ably gather the information you need to bend these individuals to your will.

Marionette is a puppet controlled from above-using wires or strings depending on regional variations. A marionette's puppeteer is called a marionettist. Marionettes are operated with the puppeteer hidden or revealed to an audience by using vertical or horizontal trough tips of soul strings on their fingers in different forms of theatres or entertainment venues. They have also been used on the Stage at Taverns or As a Street Performer. The attachment of the strings varies according to their character or purpose. Marionettists are Referred to simply as “ great puppeteers” or “puppet masters”, these bards specialize in the use of puppets to entertain, crafting intricate mechanical dolls, and using them to put on fantastic one-person shows. Though what most are unaware of a puppeteers’ true talent- manipulation. Many bards manipulate others through words or through spells but do not take the same interest in it as any Bards from the College of Marionettes is a guild of puppeteers that turn the movement of wooden dolls into a masterpiece of animation. Using their fingers and magic soul strings, they can even control the bodies of the living and animate the dead to follow their precise instructions. The puppets they craft are merely practiced for controlling those around them. Often specializing in enchantment magic, they can focus their spells into strings of psychic energy that they use to manipulate the actions of others.

Your proficiency with puppets has given you the unique ability to not only change voices but styles as well. Roll another d6 for a second puppet specialization. 

Soul Strings

Beginning at the 3rd level, You can project from your fingertips barely noticeable strands of energy that can attach to creatures and dig into others’ minds with your spells to briefly control them as though they were puppets. When a creature fails a Wisdom saving throw against a spell you cast, you can immediately expend a use of your Bardic Inspiration as a reaction. When you do, that creature takes psychic damage equal to the number rolled on the Inspiration die and that creature moves the creature up to half its speed in a direction you choose before the spell takes effect. This movement does not provoke opportunity attacks.

While your strings are attached to a creature, it is under your complete control. You can use your bonus action to take total and precise control of the target. It takes only the actions you choose and doesn’t do anything that you don’t allow it to do. You cannot command an activity that would result in certain death. You can also cause the creature to use a reaction, but this requires you to use your own reaction as well.

While your strings are attached, you can take no actions or move further than 30 feet from your target creature without breaking the strings and ending the effect.

Beginning at the 14th level, your soul strings can attach to the bodies of dead creatures and inanimate objects, turning them to your will. You can expend a Bardic Inspiration die to cast animate dead or animate objects, as appropriate, for a single target within 30 feet without expending a spell slot or spell components. The duration of this spell is a number of rounds equal to the number rolled on the Bardic Inspiration die and does not require concentration.