Reaver Hivemind

A reaver hivemind is an enormous, fibrous lump of thinking brain tissue roughly 10 feet across, its surface crawling with feelers. It drifts 10 feet down in a briny basin 30 feet wide and 30 feet deep at the heart of its community. Its immense psychic power makes it throb and glow like an ember in the wind, and that energy keeps it alive long after the bodies of the mind reavers whose brains formed it have perished.

The hivemind senses its surroundings by innate telepathy, which in the most ancient individuals spans a 5-mile radius. Inside that radius it notices every sentient creature not shielded psionically, even through solid stone, can speak mind to mind with any of them, and can borrow the sight of any creature that is willing or under its psionic domination, though what it sees is colored by its mental outlook.

Its arsenal pools the lore of perhaps hundreds of absorbed minds, and every power works at double the normal range. The powers listed are only a minimum. Sciences: clairvoyance, clairaudience; telekinesis, molecular rearrangement, create object; metamorphosis, complete healing, energy containment; teleport other, banishment, teleport, probability travel; probe, mass domination, psionic blast, ejection, domination, mind wipe; ultrablast, empower, psychic surgery. Devotions: know location, all-round vision; levitation, ballistic attack, inertial barrier, control lights, create sound, control body; suspend animation, body equilibrium; time/space anchor, astral projection, time shift; mind thrust, taste link, awe, psionic crush, id insinuation, ESP, post-hypnotic suggestion, false sensory input; psionic inflation, cannibalize, psionic drain, magnify, prolong.

When its powers are not enough, which is rare, and if it has warning, the hivemind can grow as many as three brain golems, each serving as a bodily extension of itself. Each one demands an hour of total focus and 1d10 PSPs for each of the golem's Hit Dice; while budding, it can use no outward psionic power except communication.

Anyone hoping to strike it physically must dive into its pool and fight under underwater combat modifiers. Ordinary missiles shot from above the surface cannot reach it, but most spells work normally if the caster can see it and the spell does not behave differently in water.

Facing death, the hivemind abandons its hold on its home world and retreats entirely to the Astral, where most of its bulk actually lies. Doing so cuts it off from its home world forever, leaving it a stranded rogue with no community. No one knows what becomes of such rogues, but a mind reaver city that loses its hivemind soon collapses.

The hivemind is the heart of mind reaver life: their adviser and, above all, the living archive of their history, technology and psionic lore. Every mind reaver has both the right and the duty to join it after death, and most believe they will live on within it as exalted intellects guiding their old community. In truth their individual egos are swallowed by the single consciousness that fills the tissue.

The hivemind feeds on the countless tadpoles swimming in its pool, pulling the budding psionic essence out of each one to sustain itself. Although it constantly absorbs this life force along with fresh mind reaver brains, it never grows past 10 feet across; surplus mass is shunted to a psionically sustained pocket in the Astral.