Psion - Illusive Mind
Academy Journeymage, by Magali Villeneuve © Wizards of the Coast
One more Kibblesbrew commission for you all to check out! The Illusive Mind is a tricky, deceptive psion subclass, with a new Mesmerism discipline that allows it to plant illusions directly in the minds of others.
For those who aren't regular Psion players, KibblesTasty's Psion is based around two main mechanics: disciplines and powers. Every psion subclass has a primary discipline, which it's built to work around, and which grants access to talents you can optionally take. And every power is a flexible super-cantrip; they're similar in power to (strong) cantrips, at their base level, but you can spend psi points to buff them up and achieve impressive results. The Psion itself winds up playing similarly to a warlock, but with really fun round-to-round decision making in how you spend your psi points and enhance your powers.
The Illusive Mind lends itself to a sort of offensive-support role, based around tormenting its foes and creating openings for its allies to attack. It's entirely themed around illusions, with abilities to confuse enemies, attack them with their own reflections, and otherwise manipulate the people around it.
Design-wise: Making a Psion subclass was a fun challenge, and had to start with the Mesmerism discipline. It's a fairly close counterpart to Kibbles' own Precognition discipline, granting advantage or disadvantage and dealing some resulting damage. The spell list is entirely illusion spells, including some good utility and some absolute bangers. The talents were driven mostly by theme, including a nod to Pathfinder/3.5 shadow magic. For the subclass abilities themselves, Influential Imagery is a fairly standard minor utility feature, a little unique in that it can buff up allies. Reflected Agony lets the psion slowly stack up enemy reflections on the battlefield, building up some nasty damage over time. Empowered Psionics is fairly standard, though slightly rephrased to make sure it works with Illusory Image. Illusory Armor is an idea I fell in love with when I came up with it - thematically, fake armor is sweet, and mechanically, awesome AC until you get hit is great. And Army of Illusions doubles the number of allies you've got around you, confusing the heck out of your enemies.
As always, you're invited to come discuss and offer feedback on Discord! And I'm also active in Kibbles' discord, if you want to track me down there.
