Mentalists possess and cultivate the pseudo-magical discipline of Psionics. This manifests in abilities such as telepathy, reading auras, and deceiving divinations. Mentalists can often be found in carnivals and circuses, dazzling awe-inspired crowds. More sinister Mentalists sell their abilities as spies, assassins, and investigators.

Psionic Enhancement

You can focus your psionic power to give yourself an extraordinary ability. When you finish a long rest, you gain one of the following benefits of your choice, which lasts until you finish a long rest:

• You can communicate telepathically with any creature you can see within 30 feet of you. If a creature can speak at least one language, it can respond to you telepathically.
• You gain darkvision out to 60 feet. If you already have darkvision from your race, its range increases by 30 feet.
• Choose Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma. You have advantage on saving throws of the chosen ability.

Darkvision

You gain darkvision out to 60 feet. If you already have darkvision from your race, its range increases by 30 feet.

Saving Throw - Charisma

You have advantage on Charisma saving throws.

Saving Throw - Intelligence

You have advantage on Intelligence saving throws.

Saving Throw - Wisdom

You have advantage on Wisdom saving throws.

Telepathy

You can communicate telepathically with any creature you can see within 30 feet of you. If a creature can speak at least one language, it can respond to you telepathically.

Prescient Stratagem

Upon choosing this archetype at 3rd level, you learn to read a creature’s most immediate thoughts to help protect against assault. As a bonus action, you can target a creature within 60 feet of you that you can see. The targeted creature has disadvantage on attack rolls against you until the start of your next turn. In addition, you can initiate an Intelligence contest with the creature. If the creature succeeds, you cannot initiate a contest using this ability with that creature for 24 hours. If you succeed, you gain advantage on attack rolls against the creature until the start of your next turn. These effects end early if you become incapacitated.

Aura Sight

Upon achieving 9th level, you learn to see and read auras. As a bonus action you can open your 'third eye,' enabling you to see auras out to a range of 60 feet. For 1 minute, creatures within range glow softly, producing dim light out to 5 feet. By observing a creature's aura, you learn its alignment, current emotional state, and a rough idea of its intelligence. 

You can use this feature a number of times equal to your Intelligence modifier (minimum of once). You regain all expended uses of it when you finish a long rest.
Aura Analysis. You attempt to gather information from studying a creatures aura. As an action, choose one of the following pieces of information to learn about the target:

• Current hit points
• Creature type
• Any spells currently affecting the target
• Poisons or diseases currently affecting the target
• One personality trait, ideal, bond, or flaw

There’s no limit to the number of times you can read an individual creature’s aura, but there are risks. From the outside, a casual observer would only see you staring at your target intently. The first time you read a creature’s aura, there is no chance of it detecting your invasion without additional information. Each attempt after the first, before the target has taken a long rest, there is a cumulative 25% chance that the creature takes notice. Should this happen, the reading fails, the creature becomes hostile towards you, and it attempts to shut you out. The creature initiates a contest using its Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma (its choice) against your Intelligence. If it succeeds, your Aura Sight ends, you take 6d6 psychic damage, and cannot analyze that creature until both you and it complete a long rest. On a failure, your Aura Sight doesn’t end, but you still cannot analyse the creature until it completes a long rest.

If a creature's aura is hidden or altered by magic, you can attempt an Intelligence (Arcana) check against the spell's save DC to bypass the spell. You cannot bypass the mind blank in this way.

Auras

All creatures, living and not, have auras. Just like the creatures they belong to, the appearance of every aura is unique; however, there are some commonalities between them. Alignments impact the structure and hue, emotions the color, and intelligence the saturation. The scale from Law to Chaos is symmetry to jagged and wild spikes, Good to Evil lighter to darker colors, with Neutrals taking their natural places in the middle. Sadness may be a blue, anger a red. One possible list of descriptors for intelligence is vegetation, bestial, simple, average, sharp, bright, brilliant, genius, and incomprehensible. Creatures with 'vegetation' intelligence have nearly invisible auras, while creatures on the other end are barely visible through the thick fog that is their aura.

When you know what to look for, as Mentalists do, you can learn much more with careful examination. Flickering auras indicate that death is near. An aura that seems to lash out and attack other auras are likely undead. Ribbons of strange colors indicate taint, usually pointing to poison or disease. This is an opportunity to explore your creativity, so have fun with it!

 

Inscrutable

Beginning at 13th level, you become difficult to find. You become alerted if you are the target of a magical effect that attempts to detect you or determine your location. You have advantage on saving throws to resist such effects.

Body Snatcher

Starting at 17th level, you can take over a creature’s body. As an action, you initiate an Intelligence contest with a creature within 5 feet of you that isn’t protected by protection from evil and good or a magic circle. If you win the contest, you magically transform yourself into psychic energy, teleport into the target’s brain, and take control of the target’s body. While inside the creature, you have total cover against attacks and other effects originating outside its host. You retain your Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma scores, as well as any languages you know, and your class features. You otherwise adopt the target’s statistics. You have access to everything the creature knows, including spells and languages, but must win another Intelligence contest to use anything that isn’t your own. If you lose a contest once you are controlling the creature, you are shunted out of its mind to the nearest unoccupied space that you can occupy, taking 1d10 psychic damage and 1d10 force damage.

If the host body dies, you must leave it. A protection from evil and good spell cast on the body drives you out. By spending 5 feet of your movement, you can voluntarily leave the body without taking damage, teleporting to the nearest unoccupied space within 5 feet of it. The body then resumes its own control.

At the beginning of each long rest, the host can initiate another contest, using its Intelligence, Wisdom, or Charisma (its choice) against your Intelligence. If it succeeds, you are shunted out of its mind to the nearest unoccupied space that you can occupy, taking 2d10 psychic damage and 2d10 force damage. 

You must complete a long rest before you can use this feature again.