#thought eater

 The disguise skill has many different aspects, from pretending to be someone unremarkable to avoid detection or adopting someone else’s identity to gain access to certain things, but there is a darker side. Imagine a master of disguise who takes over your entire life, pretending to be you, establishing connections, adopting or destroying your relationships, and generally violating the sanctity of you being you.

This is why monsters like doppelgangers, as well as others that can change appearance to look like anyone can be absolutely nightmarish in the right hands, including today’s subject, the thought eater!

Thought eaters, whether they mean to or not, seem to emulate doppelgangers in many ways, reading the minds of others to better pretend to be them. They tend to be less focused on the classic modus operandi of mesmerists, focusing more upon telepathy than mind control, but they still have access to that sort of magic, which can be useful for smoothing over encounters that might lead to discovery.

These occult mystics might be spies that use a cover identity they’ve stolen to perform their deeds, or they might be social saboteurs, ruining lives for a price. Others might be unstable and maladjusted individuals that have a need to steal lives.

 By reading a target through their hypnotic stare, these mesmerists can glean useful information about their behavior, making it that much easier for them to mimic their mannerisms for a whole day.

This isn’t just a matter of personality either, as they also quickly learn to adopt their mannerisms so thoroughly that they even fool magics that detect moral alignment.

While they cannot glean specific information, they also can temporarily absorb the target’s knowledge on a broad subject, using that to their benefit in either masquerading as them or for other purposes.

At the zenith of this path, thought eaters can perform a truly insidious act, absorbing the mind, body and soul of their target upon killing them. They body disintegrates away, and while they still must use magical or mundane means to appear to be them, almost all magic detects them as if they were the absorbed person. This absorption continues indefinitely, ending only when the soul is released by powerful magic or another soul is absorbed, freeing the first.

While this archetype certainly works best as a unique ability set for a villain, it might be useful for a player seeking to play a spy. The fact that they have to keep absorbing information from the same target regularly to use the disguise long-term does mean that it can lead to creepy situations where the real person is imprisoned by the mesmerist, so keep that in mind.

As far as builds go, this archetype works well for a utility and control build, gathering information with magical spy work and manipulating foes, plus some knowledge skill utility too if you can find the right targets to absorb the knowledge skill from.

 Even if they are not malicious, the mindset required to become a thought eater is certainly not a healthy one. There is a certain subversion of one’s own identity when you adopt another, and even more so when you’re using magic to literally absorb parts of one.

  Many reptoids are mesmerists or other enchantment-based casters, but only a rare few become thought eaters, able to almost perfectly become their targets. While most believe this the product of some rare capability, a few theorists believe that such thought eaters are a potential risk to reptoid operations, able to dive too deeply into a role.

 The local guardian druid has had a strange change in personality, ordering the zomok spirit living within the trees to assault travelers, tearing their wagons asunder. If the party accepts the job to discover the cause, they might discover the real druid’s body and ghost.