The College of Elegy teaches a precious lesson: immortality is everywhere. Immortality is in every moment your deeds are remembered. Immortality is every life changed by your own. Immortality is stories. These bards have a grim duty to keep the dead alive by sharing their tales, calling ectoplasmic energy into the shape of echoes resembling the departed.
Last Dance
When you join the College of Elegy at 3rd level, you learn to use performance to inspire even the restless dead.
As a bonus action, or as a reaction when a creature you can see within 60 feet of you dies, you can expend one use of your Bardic Inspiration to summon an
Echo, which appears in an unoccupied space you can see within 60 feet of you. An echo is friendly to you and your companions and obeys your commands. You determine each echo's appearance. Echoes often resemble ghostly imitations of creatures who died nearby.
In combat, an echo takes its turn on your initiative. When you summon an echo, and as a bonus action on each of your turns, you can command one echo you control to take one of the actions in its stat block or the Dash, Disengage, Help, Hide, or Search action. If you don't command an echo, that echo takes the Dodge action. An echo can move and use its reaction without your command.
An echo disappears after 1 hour, if it is reduced to 0 hit points, or if you banish it (no action required).
Grave Sight
Starting at 3rd level, you can witness a dead creature's last breaths. If you touch a corpse and spend 1 minute in a meditative trance, you gain a vision of the last moments of its life. The corpse must have a brain or a skull. You experience the vision from the dead creature's perspective, gaining perfect recall of everything it saw or did in the moments before its death.
Once you use this feature, you can't use it again until you finish a short or long rest.
Funeral Rites
At 6th level, you learn the speak with dead spell and two other necromancy spells of of your choice from any class. Each spell must be of a level for which you have spell slots, or a cantrip. The chosen spells count as bard spells for you but don't count against the number of spells you know.
Additionally, you can cast speak with dead as a ritual.
Requiem
Starting at 14th level, you can call on the echo of a creature you know, briefly returning them to life for one last goodbye.
You can use your action to speak the name of a dead creature with which you are familiar. If the creature is willing, it returns to life with all its hit points in the form of a spirit, which appears in an unoccupied space within 5 feet of you. The spirit uses the dead creature's statistics, has its memories, and has any equipment other than artifacts or sentient items the dead creature carried when it died.
The spirit is free to act as the DM deems appropriate. It might help you, attack you, or simply leave.
The spirit and its equipment vanish after 1 minute, if it is reduced to 0 hit points, or if you banish it (no action required).
Once you use this feature, you can't use it again until you finish a long rest. After calling on a dead creature using this feature, their echo fades, and you can't call on that creature again.
Comments