Aberrant Mind Sorcerer 5e

Review by Sam West, Twitter:@Crier Kobold

D&D’s main weird eldritch world of tentacle monsters and otherworldly horrors (in the 5th edition landscape, at least) is the Astral Plane. It gets to be a kind of outer space full of aberrations seeking to consume all, or just exist and cause horror for doing so. Aberrant Mind Sorcerers have a connection to this world like the Great Old One Warlock- their magic, whether inherited or imparted from a force beyond understanding, is laced with weirdness and psychic energies. As far as fantasies go, this is an absolute home run out the gate and expresses it with the spectacular Aberrant Origns table I’d recommend every Aberrant Mind Sorcerer use.

Mechanically, Aberrant Mind came at a time when Wizards of the Coast figured out the only real thing holding back sorcerers from seeing more play was their limited spells known: this fixes that problem by providing unique spells that fit the aesthetic in abundance with options to swap them for similarly fitting effects should you find they’re not regularly getting cast. Beyond expanded spells, this does everything I’d expect a psychic horror-based sorcerer to do. If the fantasy appeals to you, this will deliver on what it’s promising.

1st Level: Psionic Spells and Telepathic Speech

Psionic Spells teaches you bonus spells at 1st, 3rd, 5th, 7th, and 9th level as you unlock the higher spell levels. On top of that, you can swap a spell gained this way with another spell of the same level from the sorcerer, warlock, or wizard spell list so long as it's a divination or enchantment spell.
You start with the cantrip all-star Mind Sliver for free alongside Arms of Hadar and Dissonant Whispers. Starting with three reasonable damage options makes your other two spell selections have so much more room to breathe and explore avenues of play outside of combat. Some of the warlock exclusives added here, like Arms and Hunger of Hadar, get to be at their best, as they’re no longer restricted by Pact Magic.
I like Dissonant Whispers a lot more when I can augment it with Twinned Spell; two 3d6 blasts with a save or sprint can have huge impacts on fights.
Turns out that adding 11 spells to Sorcerer's known spells that you can flexibly swap out for divination or enchantment effects you’d prefer takes the class from feeling like a worse wizard to a reasonably competitive character with plenty of tools to live their fantasy to the fullest. This list even provides you with one of the most powerful kinds of effects in the game for free with Summon Aberration at 7th level.
I really can’t express enough how critical this feature is to Sorcerer’s early game. You have so much more to do session to session with all the free stuff given here.
Telepathic Speech comes alongside Psionic Spells to give you a special, non-spell feature to be a psionic, otherworldly character. As far as telepathic communication goes, this is a fine tool to have access to for discreet plans that require the party to split up or look like they don’t know each other. You can act as a communication hub for the group over a few rounds by passing around the communication as long as everyone is within 30 feet of each other without anyone needing to speak a word. These kinds of features aren’t game-warping by any stretch, but this one does set you up to feel like a psychic at 1st level with a fairly interesting ability compared to Message and other similar telepathic communication tools.

6th Level: Psionic Sorcery and Psychic Defenses

Speaking of Wizards of the Coast having figured out how to fix problems, they finally realized that the passive defensive features are too bland to leave on their own. To remedy this, they started providing fairly weak, yet more interesting abilities alongside reasonable defensive tools.

Psionic Sorcery gives you a sorcery point discount for casting spells you’ve gained through your Psionic Spells feature. This can include spells you’ve swapped in for others; if you didn’t want Arms of Hadar and swapped it for something like Charm Person, you can just spend a sorcery point to cast it now. Normally, spell slots cost more than their level worth of sorcery points to create. This discounts each by 1 or 2 points, which scales into you feeling like you have a lot of additional spells to work with. Its main issue is that it’s competing with Metamagic in a fairly small pool of total resources; still, you’ll find moments where you’re using the points to get one extra cast of something like Calm Emotions or Evarad’s Black Tentacles in a pinch.
Psychic Defenses is the passive defensive feature that gives you resistance to psychic damage and advantage on saves to not be charmed or feared. The bulk of the power here is in the condition boons, and those aren’t happening in most encounters still. It’s a fine passive defense upgrade made a lot more palatable when paired with an option for extra psychic spell casts.

14th Level: Revelation in Flesh

Revelation in Flesh provides you with a fun little tool to grow weird aberrant features that give you passive upgrades in a variety of situations. You can get better eyes to see invisible creatures, a fly speed with hover, a super fast swimming speed with underwater breathing, and the amorphous trait, which by far is the coolest element of this.
You’re not regularly going to need more than one of these at a time; typically, when you need to fly, you’ll spend a single point for the hover speed for 10 minutes, and when you need to slip through an inch wide gap, you’ll use that ability instead. In the rare circumstance you need both, it's nice you can do it, though.
What’s more is the activation cost is a bonus action, meaning should you get surprised by an Invisible Stalker, you can toggle on your invisible vision and be good to go. You’re never spending your entire turn in combat to get any of these abilities you may need.
This ability is incredibly cheap to use which is the main reason I’d be excited to get it. None of the abilities are going to provide the team access to a tool you couldn’t have had earlier, but does provide about as cheap a way to get them as you could ask for. All of these abilities come with wonderful cosmetic alterations, too. I adore this kind of feature.

18th Level: Warping Implosion

Warping Implosion I am less excited by but that’s mainly because it’s competing with other top-tier features and 9th-level spells. An action for a 120 ft. teleport with a 3d10 damage vacuum definitely feels like it fits thematically here, but the numbers and action cost are too high when you’ve got 9th, 8th, 7th, 6th, and 5th level spells that are going to have a higher impact in most situations and directly compete for your action. The free use definitely improves the feature, but I can’t ever imagine I’d regularly want to spend a quarter of my total sorcery points using this again between rests.
Fortunately, you’re an 18th-level sorcerer who now has access to 9th-level spells, making this feature’s mediocrity not even remotely an issue for you. You’re still going to be doing the most powerful things at the table at this tier.

All Together

Aberrant Mind is a spectacular Sorcerous Origin. It solves one of Sorcerer’s largest problems cleanly and flavorfully with excellent spells you’re often going to want on this kind of character anyway. Every feature it gets has some amount of utility with some inspired designs like Revelation in Flesh giving you exactly the kind of tools you’d want on a weird psychic alien creature you’re building towards.

If any of the eldritch horror iconic looks appeal to you, and you want to do magic stuff related to it, this is the subclass for you.

Thank you for visiting!

If you’d like to support this ongoing project, you can do so by buying my books, getting some sweet C&C merch, or joining my Patreon.

The text on this page is Open Game Content, and is licensed for public use under the terms of the Open Game License v1.0a.

‘d20 System’ and the ‘d20 System’ logo are trademarks of Wizards of the Coast, Inc.
and are used according to the terms of the d20 System License version 6.0.
A copy of this License can be found at www.wizards.com/d20.