Homebrew Sentient Slime Species Details
The more or less widespread slime, a simple creature by nature, gaining the complexity of sentience and consciousness through being infused with magic and subjected to an unknown process. Despite their numbers, extremely few slimes gain sentience.
Magic-fuelled beings
Slimes have a core, a source of magic that controls their amorphous bodies once they gain sentience. Without magic in reserve, the core can’t sustain the body and needs to recover. Because of their magical nature, slimes are capable of some unique magical feats, as well as being influenced by it. Slimes can live in almost any environment and learn to blend in, which let them develop an elemental affinity over time. Fuelled by magic means as long as the core is safe a slime can live forever and always recover to its original form or adapt to a new environment.
New to society
It is still unknown how slimes gain a core, but it started fairly recently. There are very few slimes in mundane society and when seen, they are sometimes treated more like the monsters they are. The majority of sentient slimes know nothing of society or are still learning, so they are sometimes gullible and mostly don’t know how to read their room or how to behave. They are very curious, but stay aside from dangers by instinct. Those slimes who integrate into society tend to be neutral or friendly, unused to holding grudges and quite blunt. If there are any slimes who take to adventuring, it’s either curiosity or them slowly discovering themselves. Jokes or expressions may be beyond them, and not everyone has a good grasp on languages. Slimes don’t have a language, so they gradually learn from the ones they’re exposed to.
Sentient Slime Traits
Your sentient slime character has a variety of natural abilities, developed before gaining sentience for survival.Ability Score Increase
Your Charisma is increased by 2 and either your Dexterity or your Constitution is increased by 1.
Age
As a slime, it is unknown how long their lifespan is, but they don't appear to age.
Alignment
As a creature fairly new to society, you learn from your environment. You can choose any alignment.
Size
A slime's real body is usually a blob of about 3 to 4 feet in diameter. Your size is Small.
Speed
You have a base walking speed of 30 feet.
Liquid Body
Your body is a mass of liquid held together by a core. Your core is your heart and mind while the mass of liquid exists to protect it. It is roughly 1.5 inches in diameter.
You are resistant to piercing, bludgeoning and slashing from nonmagical attacks, but are vulnerable to cold and force damage.
When you are subjected to cold damage, your body starts to freeze. Your Dexterity score is halved (rounded down), your movement speed is reduced by 15 feet and you lose the ability to slimeshift. You are also forced to release your grappled target if you have one. You need to wait for your body to thaw out before the drawbacks disappear, be it by taking fire damage or staying by a heat source. At the longest, it takes 45 minutes at room temperature to thaw out an instance of cold damage.
Since your body is amorphous, you can squeeze through any space that can fit your core. That includes any space greater than 1.5 inches in diameter.
If you are in your true form, you can traverse a space occupied by a creature as difficult terrain. Whenever you are subjected to a movement impairing status, take force of fall damage, your body loses shape and you need to spend an action to restore whatever shape you had via Slimeshift.
Magic Reserve
Your core stores magic power within itself. It is represented as a number of magic reserve points.
Starting at level 1, you have 2 magic reserve points to spend on one of 7 features as a bonus action. Your level determines the number of magic reserve points you have. For every 2 levels past the first, you have 1 more magic reserve point. If you expend all your magic reserve points, you suffer 2 levels of exhaustion. You cannot reduce your exhaustion below 2 until you've recovered your magic reserve, and 2 levels of exhaustion are removed when you fully recover your magic reserve. If a spell is cast within 5ft of the core you recover 1 magic reserve point. This can only happen once a turn and the source must be anything other than yourself. You recover all your magic reserve points if you finish a short or long rest.
You can spend your magic reserve to access the following features:
- Apply your elemental affinity bonus to an attack or spell
- Bypass the material requirements of a spell
- Give one willing creature you touch resistance to your slime's element for 1 turn
- Heal a willing creature for 1d6 + your Int modifier
- Give one willing creature you touch +1 to one Ability Score modifier for 1 turn
- Shorten the cast time of a spell by half
- Copy the effects of a magical weapon or armour within 10ft of you for 5 turns if you are slimeshifted
Your Elemental Affinity is the element your core is infused with. It determines the colour of the slime and the damage type and the resistance that can be applied. The elemental damage starts at 1d6 at level 1, increasing by another 1d6 every 5 levels.
Slimeshifting
You are capable of manipulating your body to fit your needs.
As an action, you can transform your appearance to that of a small or medium creature. You decide what you look like, including your body shape, facial features, sound of your voice, density, and distinguishing characteristics, if any. You can make yourself appear as a member of another race, though none of your statistics change. At any time you can use your action to change your appearance in this way again.
Instead of appearing as a living being, you can also appear as a piece of equipment. As an action your shape changes to that of a simple or martial weapon or a piece of armour. You would deal 1d8 bludgeoning, piercing or slashing damage, as appropriate to the weapon you choose. As an armour the wearer gains an AC 12 + your Constitution modifier (max 2) and half the damage is redirected from the wearer to the armour. You are only allowed to cast touch spells while slimeshifted as a piece of equipment. As a weapon you can consider touch range when you are used to attack.
While slimeshifted, you cannot use any traits or abilities aside from Slimeshift and Magic Reserve. The restrictions from Liquid Body always apply.
Eyeless
As you lack eyes, you are reduced to 60ft of blindsight and 120 ft of tremorsense to see around yourself. Beyond that you are blind.
Languages
You have absorbed a language from your stay near the closest civilisation. Pick any one language.
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