Kalashtar
by Prince Phantom
A race bound to a spirit that acts as a guiding force for the individual to follow, the Kalashtar has great lore and roleplay opportunities. It’s also the default psychic race, and has all of the abilities one would expect that concept to have. Let’s see just how good those are.
Kalashtar Features
Dual Mind: Advantage on all Wisdom saves is wonderful, and at low levels this will make you very consistent at them regardless of your Wisdom score or proficiencies. However, once save DCs start to reach 17 and above, you need to invest in your Wisdom saves in another way like the Resilient feat. This is because advantage can’t help you if no result on the die roll would cause you to succeed, and at high levels those DCs can go well over 20.
Mental Discipline: Resistance to psychic damage will come up very rarely, but this is another way for the Bear Totem Barbarian to get resistance to all damage types when raging.
Mind Link: This is one of the best telepathy features provided by any race. The potential distance that you can use this as is fantastic, but at level 3 it is already matching the distance that most races can use telepathy at. It’s also notable that this allows the target of our telepathy to talk back to us, something you don’t really notice is lacking from many other telepathic races until you read this one.
Severed from Dreams: This is the most ribbon of a ribbon feature that I’ve ever seen. Tell me, when is the last time you were targeted by something that effected your dreams, and if you were, what was the result of that effect? I reckon it was probably not that devastating. The only way this will come up is if your DM remembers that you have this and intentionally targets you with the Dream spell so you feel cool.
The Kalashtar gets a bunch of cool features that really sell the whole “psychic race” theme, and are probably the best pick to fulfill that fantasy. That being said, many races have better defensive features than Dual Mind, and telepathy is usually more of a roleplay and exploration feature than a combat one. I’d say this race shines at heavy roleplay tables, and doesn’t really have a place at combat focused tables.
Final Rating: 3/5
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