THE MIND FLAYER

Ability Score Increase: +2 INT, +1 CON

Size: Medium

Speed: Base walking speed is 30

Darkvision: 60ft

Telepathy: Your malformed mouth is unfit for speaking; instead, you may telepathically communicate with one creature of your choice within 120ft. You do not need to share a language to understand each other.

Mind Blast: As an action, you can emit a wave of psionic energy in a 15ft cone. Creatures you choose within that area take 2d4 psychic damage and are stunned until the end of their next turn. Creatures that succeed on an intelligence saving throw take half damage and are not stunned. The DC of this saving throw is equal to 8 + your INT mod + your proficiency.

The damage of this ability increases by 1d4 and its range increases by 5ft at levels 6, 11, and 16.

Once you have used this ability, you may not use it again until you devour the brain of a creature whose intelligence in life was 12 or higher.

Devour Brain: You can spend 1 minute devouring the brain of a creature that has died within the last 10 minutes. If the creature's intelligence in life was 12 or higher, you might learn a piece of useful information the creature knew in life, and your Mind Blast feature is recharged. If the creature's intelligence is 9 or lower, you are stunned for 1 round and poisoned for 1 hour. You can devour a number of brains equal to your CON modifier (Min. 1) between each long rest.

Aberrant Mind: Even those illithids who have undergone alignment shifts via magical means or mutations struggle to understand the thoughts of less-alien beings. You have disadvantage on all Wisdom (Insight) checks to interpret the behavior of non-illithid creatures, as well as Charisma (Persuasion) checks to persuade them.

Languages: You can "speak," read, and write, Deep Speech, Common and Undercommon, and can write Qualith, a language so unintuitive to most humanoid minds that only fellow illithids can decipher it without the use of magic by feeling it with their tentacles. Undercommon is a language of commerce among the subterranean races in the same way Common is among the surfacers.