The Deep Hive

This is an adaptation of the Deep Apiarist class from the game "Heart: The City Beneath" by Grant Howitt and Chris Taylor. It fits best in Lovecraftian horror settings.

As a Deep Apiarist, you have surrendered your mind and body into the care of the Deep Hive, a super-colony of eldritch bees that, together, form a mega-consciousness of deific knowledge and power. Taking on this patron involves a gruesome process in which approximately 200 eldritch bees must enter the person's body through their mouth and nose. Some Apiarists do this willingly, but the vast majority do not. Those that willingly partake view it as spiritual enlightenment and go to great lengths to acquire their bees which are extremely rare and taboo. Those that become Deep Apiarists unwillingly may have been subjected to the ritual by a cult of the Hive, or simply been unlucky enough to encounter these rare bees another way.

A Deep Apiarist's abilities manifest in two distinct ways: 1) their ability to access the Hive's consciousness and 2) the simple fact that a Deep Apiarist's body is partially made up of eldritch bees and the structures that they build. The Deep Hive does not have motivation or emotion. However, it does have a natural tendency to create order and efficiency where there was chaos and inefficiency. The Hive's consciousness provides access to magic and the ability to alter the fabric of reality while the physical bees alter your body itself, making you into a sort of wax cyborg. Your body regenerates at an incredible rate, has far fewer weak points, and no longer requires inefficient processes like sleep.

Expanded Spell List

The Deep Hive lets you choose from an expanded list of spells when you learn a warlock spell. The following spells are added to the warlock spell list for you.

Deep Hive Expanded Spells

Spell Level	Spells
1st	command, false life
2nd	detect thoughts, alter self
3rd	haste, animate dead
4th	confusion, compulsion
5th	commune, geas

Necessary Improvements

The bees have repaired the most glaring inefficiencies of your mind and body.

• You no longer sleep. You are immune to any effect that would cause you to sleep. Instead you only need to enter a trance for 4 hours to complete a long rest. The bees use this time to perform maintenance. You can perform repetitive, mindless tasks while in this trance. 
• You have advantage against charm effects as the bees have installed defenses against external influence. 
• You cannot die of natural causes. The bees keep your organs in perfect working order.

Redundant Systems

At 6th level, the eldritch bees living in your body have added redundant copies of vital organs in case the original is damaged, making it impossible to target a particularly vulnerable area of your body. You are immune to critical hits.

Disincorporate

Starting at 10th level, whenever you like, you may perform a 10 minute ritual in which the eldritch bees within you consume your entire body. While in this swarm form, you are under the effects of the Gaseous Form spell. This is not a magical effect and is not affected by spells like Dispel Magic. You control the actions of the swarm and retain your mental stats and awareness. You may have it rebuild your body as a 10 minute ritual at any point, however after one hour passes, the bees will begin to reconstitute your body wherever they are. You are incapacitated while the bees are consuming or reconstituting your body.

Create Thrall

At 14th level, you gain the ability to infect a humanoid’s mind with the alien magic of your patron. You can use your action to touch an incapacitated humanoid. That creature is then charmed by you until a remove curse spell is cast on it, the charmed condition is removed from it, or you use this feature again.

You can communicate telepathically with the charmed creature as long as the two of you are on the same plane of existence.