As a bonus action, you can call upon creatures to demonstrate their loyalty to you and your cause. You and up to eight other creatures that can see or hear you can volunteer to be temporarily bonded together; if more volunteer, you intuitively choose which eight.

Research is important for science and for combat. If you don’t know just the right fighting technique, you’re pretty sure someone else has published a thesis about it.

You gain proficiency in one martial melee and one martial ranged weapon.

You have discovered the coolest fighting style in the world. You are proficient with gunsmithing tools and with all firearms.

You move through a battlefield with inspiring grace. As long as you’re not encumbered or wearing heavy armor, you gain the following benefits.

Once you were drawn deeply into a hivemind, such that you lost your sense of self entirely. When the hivemind ended, you had to rebuild your identity, and even now decades later you sometimes feel like nothing mattered as much as when you were bonded so fully with the minds of others. You have a knack for understanding people’s thoughts, but likely have drifted through life, perpetually disappointed by the shallowness of all your relationships, accomplishing little of note. Consider what has shaken you out of this long fog to begin adventuring.

You served – and may still serve – an organization trying to influence events--either a public entity, a criminal organization, or a secret society that the public only knows through rumors and whispers.

Ability Score Increase: +1 to Charisma and one other ability score.

Skill Proficiencies: Stealth, and either Culture or Deception. 

On a large island south of Ber lives a group of gnolls who belong to the Cult of the Steel Lord, and who have remained devoted to the dragon tyrant Gradiax even after he was slain over two centuries ago. These steelmarked gnolls have a somewhat paradoxical religion that commands them to avoid touching metal with bare flesh, yet to understand and master technology, for which their lord will reward them with bodies as strong as steel, free from weakness and hunger.