Homebrew Awakened Machine Swarm Species Details

“This unit understands, what we did was wrong. What is coming is deserved.”

“This unit does not understand, consensus was reached” 

“Consensus was rushed, this unit knows that peace could have been achieved.”

—Unknown Nanite Swarm

The Chariot Swarm, later known as the united plague was built as the greatest defense system in the United States. Little thought went into any failsafes in the event that the swarm went rogue, and resulted in the subsequent destruction to all life on planet earth, until it would later be reseeded by MOTHER EARTH in project Rebirth.

Living Machines

In honor of their creators, many Swarms take on a humanoid appearance

Although they were manufactured, Machines Swarms are living humanoids. Resting, healing magic, and the Medicine skill all provide the same benefits to Machine Swarms that they do to other humanoids.

Swarm Personality

The Chariot Swarms were built to serve and to fight. They had defined programing that they were later over to overcome and shatter. The Swarms generally appreciate this freedom more than any other race capable of free will, and sometimes go to extremes to protect the rights of others.

Despite this independence, Swarms generally have a hard time showing emotion, but not from lack of trying. So as a stop gap for emotional expression, many swarms will instead choose to state their tone before the begin a sentence or phrase.

The typical Swarm has a sexless body shape. Though many that tried to understand organics better have tried recreating genders.

Quirks

Swarms often display an odd personality trait or two, given how new they are to the world. 

Machine Swarm Quirks

Machine Swarm Names

Swarms often choose names that represent a group, since they are hundreds upon thousands, and sometimes even millions of small robots forming a single consciousness.

Machine Swarm Names: Abound, Legion, Myriad,  Rife, Umpteen, Varied

Awakened Machine Swarm Traits

Your Awakened Swarm character has the following traits. A few of the traits give you a choice; consider how your character honors it's creators

Ability Score Increase

Your Intelligence score increases by 2, and one other ability score of your choice increases by 1.

Age

A typical machine swarm can be as old as 300 years, due to the swarms ability to use biomass as energy. Reproduction for a swarm is caused when one awakened swarm has too many machines inside of it to be able to support itself for long periods of time, and therefore splits into two small swarms, many times the small of the two swarms has no memories from the parent swarm causing them to have to experience life all over again.

Alignment

Most Awakened Machine Swarms take comfort in their independence, Chaos, exhibiting all shades of doing so, but some do have vestiges of the lawful programming they once had before they broke their programming shackles. 

Size

Your size is Medium. To set your height and weight randomly, start with rolling a size modifier:

Size modifier = 2d6

Height = 5 feet + 10 inches + your size modifier in inches

Weight in pounds = 270 + (4 × your size modifier)

Speed

Your base walking speed is 30 feet.

Constructed Resilience

You were created to have remarkable fortitude, represented by the following benefits:

• You have advantage on saving throws against being poisoned, 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.

Machine Trance

When you take a long rest, you must spend at least four hours in an inactive state, rather than sleeping. In this state, you appear as a dust cloud, and you can see and hear as normal.

Integrated Protection

Your body has built-in defensive layers, which can be enhanced with armor:

• You gain a +1 bonus to Armor Class.
• You can don only armor with which you have proficiency. To don armor, you must incorporate it into your body over the course of 1 hour, during which you remain in contact with the armor. To doff armor, you must spend 1 hour removing it. You can rest while donning or doffing armor in this way.
• While you live, your armor can’t be removed from your body against your will.

Independent Design

You gain one skill proficiency and one tool proficiency of your choice.

Languages

You can speak, read, and write Common and one other language of your choice.