Vestiges are remnants of powerful spirits residing in the nothingness outside of reality. Vestiges are born of dead gods and tragic heroes, but their forms, personalities, and motivations are shaped by the whims of remembrance.
In order to harbor a vestige, a binder must divide their very soul and offer part of it to the vestige for residence. As the vestige pushes its way into reality it influences its binder’s personality and usually warps their body in accordance with the vestige’s esoteric form. Skilled binders learn to break their soul into smaller and smaller pieces to bind greater and more numerous spirits, regardless of the consequences.
5th Level Vestiges
Get all 31 Vestiges in the Complete Binder!
Elozahr the Blue
Elozahr, the legendary founder of the Evocation school of magic, grants his binders frigid arcana and his steely concentration.
Legend. All wizards know the story of Evocatia and Elozahr, the ill-fated mages that founded the School of Evocation.
In the days before the schools of magic, the rules of arcana were fluid, and only those of patient countenance and forceful will could tame arcana. With time, the cleverest spellcasters learned to tame magic, channeling it into spells with direct intent.
Elozahr the Blue was one such spellcaster. Patiently and deliberately, Elozahr sculpted his spells from ice, first creating the cantrip ray of frost, and then the spell ice storm. With decades of work and the assistance of his apprentice, Evocatia the Red, he perfected his masterpiece, a spell so powerful that few mages could lay claim to it: cone of cold. He traveled to his apprentice’s scorching, iron tower to test her mettle with this new spell, but instead discovered that Evocatia’s familiar was a sinister fiend, who tempted her with secrets of hellfire magic. Outraged, Elozahr froze her tower solid and shattered it to bits.
The two wizards worked in secret to outdo one another, each laying the foundations for their own schools of magic. At last, Elozahr and Evocatia met on the field of Armistal to parley and settle their differences. But Elozahr found that his apprentice carried with her a flame tongue meant to slay him, so he struck first with an icy blast.
Summoning all their canny and arcane might, the two wizards unleashed a torrent of wrath upon each other. When all was done, nothing remained of Evocatia and Elozahr but dust. True to his work, Elozahr’s vestige is a sculpture of a mage, carved from black ice, whose voice is like a howling wind.
Personality Trait. While bound to this vestige, you gain the following personality trait: “I spend much of my time in deep concentration, speaking slowly and methodically when I must speak.”
Elozahr, The Blue
5th-level vestige
Inheritance of Frost
While bound to Elozahr, you know the ray of frost cantrip. Additionally, you can add your Charisma modifier to damage rolls you make with spells that deal cold damage.
Crystalline Arcana
When you cast a spell that affects an area and requires your concentration, you can choose a number of Medium or smaller creatures equal to your Charisma modifier to be protected from its effects. A 5-foot cube gap in the spell effects opens around each chosen creature. These creatures don’t need to make saving throws against the spell. Additionally, for the spell’s duration, these creatures are immune to the effects of the spell within its area and ignore conditions, such as difficult terrain, created by the spell.
Spellcasting: Cryomancy
While bound to Elozahr, you can cast the following spells, without expending a spell slot or material components:
2/day each: sleet storm
1/day each: ice storm, cone of cold
You regain all expended uses of these spells when you finish a long rest.
Trait: Hoarfrost
While bound to Elozahr, your skin, as well as your clothing, weapons, and armor, are covered with a thick frost, and your breath is visible, as if on a cold night. Whenever you begin concentrating on a spell, this frost grows into large ice crystals on your skin. As long as you maintain concentration, whenever you take damage, you can subtract the spell’s level from the damage you take. Fire damage ignores the effects of this feature.
Korine, the Displaced
A renowned planar researcher who discovered the true nature of the Void, Korine offers her binders the power to defy physics, chiefly through teleportation.
Legend. Korine was a talented arcanist and planar researcher, among the first to study the Void. After years of research, she made a breakthrough realization: the Void is not simply a mathematical constant, a force, or a dividing boundary, but an actual plane of existence—like the Ethereal or Elemental Planes—albeit with even stranger rules. When she revealed her findings to her colleagues, they mocked her and decried her discovery, touting centuries old planar models instead.
Undeterred, Korine set about crafting a plane shift spell to travel to and traverse this unexplored Void and ameliorate her reputation. The spell, which drew power from an active sphere of annihilation, functioned perfectly, but its result was disastrous.
Korine cast her spell in front of an audience of fellow arcanists, and in an instant of magical tumult, she was spread thinly across time and space. But in her last moments, she saw the curvature of space, saw it wrap around, and saw the hideous secrets behind it laid bare. And at last, she saw her place in it all. Then she met oblivion.
Appropriately, Korine’s vestige is only loosely associated with reality: her humanoid figure is disconnected at every joint, floating about in a strange orbit, and open, darting eyes cover every body part in the mutilated cloud. Perhaps, this is her physical personage, which has persisted in the Void. No other creature, after all, has successfully traveled to that strange place, and it is unclear what truly remains of her body or soul.
Personality Trait. While bound to this vestige, you gain the following personality trait: “I hatch elaborate plans on the fly, but don’t always think out the consequences.”
Korine, The Displaced
5th-level vestige
Loose Gravitation
While bound to Korine, the distance of your long jump and height of your high jump are doubled, and any falling damage you take is halved.
Telefrag
Whenever you cast a spell that teleports you, you can choose to teleport into a space occupied by a creature. When you do so, the creature takes 1d4 force damage for every 10 feet you teleported, up to a maximum of 6d4, and, if you and the creature are within two size categories of one another, it is pushed into an adjacent unoccupied space of its choice.
Spellcasting: Blink
While bound to Korine, you can cast the following spells, without expending a spell slot or material components:
At will: misty step
2/day: dimension door
1/day each: blink, teleportation circle
You regain all expended uses of these spells when you finish a long rest.
Trait: Dimensional Error
While bound to Korine, your body becomes wedged between reality and nonexistence. Your joints, including your neck, shoulders, elbows, hips, and knees, seem to have vanished into some other plane, leaving your other body parts loosely floating in their positions. As a result, whenever you are hit by an attack, roll a d20. On a 20, the attack misses.
Vortirrackt, the Outsider
A creature from beyond our multiverse, Vortirrackt warps its binders into a reflection of its bizarre anatomy.
Legend. When the brilliant scientist Korine cast the fateful spell that thrust her to the Void, an eldritch, horrific thing crept through behind her in the rift to our world. This creature, Vortirrackt, was unlike anything seen in the multiverse: it had pale, slimy skin, impervious to weapons, a long head that terminated in razor-sharp teeth, and six sickeningly long limbs, each with one joint more than a terrestrial creature and claw-like barbs at the end. Worse yet, this creature was no mere beast, as its frightful intellect would demonstrate.
Vortirrackt stalked out of the dimensional pit in front of a gathering of wizards, researchers, and arcanists. It exchanged a long glance with those in attendance, then pounced, butchering any it caught in its elongated grasp. Dozens of innocents perished, and the mages of the arcane university retreated from their great tower to regroup. Bands of knights were sent to slay the beast and reclaim the tower, to no avail; their heads were seen to be arranged at the tower’s windows mere hours later.
Thankfully, a powerful warding spell managed to seal Vortirrackt within, but it did not contain its telepathy. The creature mocked the wizards of the tower and their petty attempts to slay it. Gradually, it learned their names, their specialties, and what best to say to torment them.
With no other options, the archmagi concluded that they would widen the rift, swallowing the whole of the tower and the monster, before sealing the widened rift beneath a mountain. A hundred adventurers entered the warded tower, which Vortirrackt had rigged into a fiendish dungeon, but only one, Carthin the Runebreaker, escaped the monster’s deathtrap.
Today, Vortirrackt’s foul name is synonymous with spells gone awry, the folly of mages, and the hideous things that lie beyond the stars. Moreover, its legend drew forth a vestige: a spitting image of the beast itself, whose figure appears distorted as if seen though a warped mirror.
Flaw. While bound to this vestige, you gain the following flaw: “I enjoy tormenting my enemies, sowing hate and doubt in their minds.”
Vortirrackt, The Outsider
5th-level vestige
Snap Reflexes
When you make an opportunity attack, you can choose to do so without expending your reaction, and you gain advantage on the attack roll. Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you finish a short or long rest.
Trait: Spider-Climber
When you bind Vortirrackt, your skin becomes pale and strangely adhesive. You can move up, down, and across vertical surfaces and upside down along ceilings, while leaving your hands free. You also gain a climbing speed equal to your walking speed.
Trait: Abominable Limbs
When you bind Vortirrackt, your hands sprout sickening claws. These claws are natural melee weapons, which you can use to make unarmed strikes. They deal 1d4 slashing damage on a hit, and you can use your Charisma modifier, instead of Strength, for their attack and damage rolls. The claws count as magical for the purpose of overcoming resistance and immunity to nonmagical attacks and damage.
When you take the Attack action, you can make one unarmed strike with the claws as a bonus action. Additionally, when use your claws to hit a creature that has already been hit with them during that turn, you deal an extra 2d6 slashing damage.
Trait: Extraneous Joint
When you bind Vortirrackt, your arms and legs deform, lengthening and cracking until they each contain an additional joint. The reach of all of your melee attacks, as well as your reach for opportunity attacks, extends out to 10 feet. Additionally, you can make an opportunity attack against any creature that moves while within your reach.
6th-Level Vestiges
Methuselah, Eldest Dead
A man who grew so old that he slipped between life and unlife, Methuselah grants his binders authority over undeath and his strange disconnect from mortality.
Legend. Methuselah was a man so loved by the gods that they blessed him with unnaturally long life — so long, in fact, that he became the oldest mortal to have ever lived.
Methuselah spent his first century of life raising a family. But when he outlived his children and his grandchildren, Methuselah was heartbroken. He went to live with the elves, but in time he outlived generations of them too. In his most venerable age, his bones became brittle, his teeth fell out, and his skin wrinkled and lost its color. When at last Methuselah lay on his deathbed, he was little more than a husk, cursing the gods for their so-called blessing and pleading for the release of death.
Today, Methuselah is venerated by necromancers and intelligent undead as the Eldest, the wisest and most venerable among the deceased. Their reverence paints him with a kind of undeath, as demonstrated by his vestige: a shambling corpse missing its eyes, teeth, and nose, with wispy white hair and a beard that hangs to the floor.
Personality Trait. While bound to this vestige, you gain the following personality trait: “I believe myself to be far older, wiser, and wearier than others.”
Methuselah, Eldest Dead
6th-level vestige
Grave Empathy
The undead can innately sense your closeness to their kind. Whenever an undead tries to attack you, it must make a Wisdom saving throw. On a failed save, its attack misses. On a successful save, the undead is immune to this feature for the next 24 hours.
Corpse Shepherd
You can perform a 10-minute ritual to summon a Medium humanoid corpse or pile of bones (your choice), which is magically teleported to your location from a random cemetery.
Spellcasting: Dead Alive
While bound to Methuselah, you can raise corpses at your touch. You can cast the following spells, without expending a spell slot or material components:
At will: false life
3/day: animate dead
1/day: create undead
You regain all expended uses of these spells when you finish a long rest.
Trait: Venerable
While bound to Methuselah, you appear dramatically aged. Your voice descends into a hoarse rasp, your hair grows white, and deep wrinkles appear in your skin. Additionally, you can siphon the life and youth from others. As an action, you can make a melee spell attack against a hostile creature you touch. On a hit, the target takes 4d6 necrotic damage, and you regain hit points equal to half the necrotic damage dealt.
Mr. Joe, Master Puppet
Mr. Joe was a show-stopping puppeteer who climbed to the height of godhood. Those who bind him can find that his strings can manipulate others as well as he manipulated puppets.
Legend. When Ruse, the trickster god, perished, none truly believed his fate until his last will and testament was proclaimed by the other gods: there would be a contest of cunning and subterfuge to determine his successor. Only one truly worthy of the mantle of “God of Lies, Lord of Fools” could ascend to godhood in his passing. Many, from powerful demigods to lowly jesters, arrived at the Temple of Ruse to engage in the contest.
Among the contestants was an entertainer known as Hogarth the Astounding, who dressed in wizards’ garb and performed mundane tricks with his “assistant,” a ventriloquist’s puppet named Mr. Joe. In the contest, Hogarth barely avoided elimination, but managed to persist to the final ten.
In the final game, each contestant was given a unique signet ring. If any contestant could secure all ten rings, then step into the lit pyre at the temple’s center, they would ascend to Ruse’s place at the divine table. After a week of feints and illusions, a demigod of gambling assembled the full set of rings. Stepping into the flames, he was immolated in screaming agony; one of his rings, a wooden fake, burned to ash on his finger.
It was then that Hogarth revealed his grand façade: beneath his robes were wooden joints and marionette strings; he was but an elaborate fabrication, a puppet expertly controlled by Mr. Joe, a geppettin—an animated puppet-person—posing as a prop the entire time. Mr. Joe, held the true signet ring, whereas Hogarth’s was a fake as convincing as himself. Picking up the remaining rings, Mr. Joe stepped into the flames and ascended to become Sham, Lord of Trickery.
Personality Trait. While bound to this vestige, you gain the following personality trait: “I love to put on performances for others, especially when using unwilling participants.”
Mr. Joe, Master Puppet
6th-level vestige
No Strings on Me
While bound to Mr. Joe, you can’t be charmed or possessed.
Puppeteering
Whenever you cast the dominate beast or dominate person spell, you can take total and precise control of the target as a bonus action, rather than an action. Additionally, you can concentrate on two of these spells at once, taking control of both targets using one bonus action, and making only one saving throw to maintain concentration on both spells.
Spellcasting: Soul Strings
While bound to Mr. Joe, you can cast the following spells, without expending a spell slot:
At will: command
2/day each: dominate beast, dominate person
1/day each: compulsion, irresistible dance
You regain all expended uses of these spells when you finish a long rest.
Trait: Dummy
While bound to Mr. Joe, your skin appears wooden and lacquered, your joints seem to be wooden hinges, and your nose grows into a conspicuously long peg. While you remain motionless, you are indistinguishable from a puppet. Moreover, you can throw your voice, causing it to originate from any point you choose within 60 feet of you.
Remus, Firstborn of the Wolf
The embittered twin who nearly founded an empire, Remus grants his binders a taste of his barbaric demigod fury.
Legend. Romulus and Remus, the twin sons of a god of war, were bundled in a basket and set adrift in a river shortly after their birth. Helpless and alone, the twins were rescued by Lupa, a she-wolf, who nursed them for weeks and granted the sickly Remus the gift of lycanthropy, so that he might grow to be as strong as his brother. The twins grew quickly, and—demigods as they were—inherited their father’s immense strength and savagery.
By adulthood, nothing could stand in the twins’ way, save for their own bickering. Despite their godly power, the two could never decide on anything. Most of all, they quarreled over their legacy. Remus wanted to conquer the city-states from which the two of them had been cast off as infants, but Romulus had resolved to establish a city-state of his own. Remus ultimately acquiesced, but the two couldn’t decide on where to build it.
The twins stood on their hills and cast augury. In their wisdom, the gods delivered a sign of weal and woe, hoping this would bring the bothers solidarity, but they argued over the result and came to blows. Romulus and Remus fought bare-fisted, and Remus became more bestial as he grew in fury. As last, Romulus stabbed Remus in the side with a small silver dagger, killing him.
Romulus built his city atop his brother’s corpse and named it after himself. Through his contempt, Remus persisted as a vestige, appearing furious and animalistic, growing only more bitter with the passing centuries, as his brother’s city grew and swelled into a world-spanning empire.
Flaw. While bound to this vestige, you gain the following flaw: “I harbor a seething resentment for my family.”
Remus, Firstborn of the Wolf
6th-level vestige
Bonus Proficiencies
While bound to Remus, you gain proficiency with battleaxes, greataxes, mauls, and warhammers.
Extra Attack
You can attack twice, instead of once, whenever you take the Attack action on your turn.
Fury
On your turn, you can use your bonus action to summon up Remus’s bottomless rage. For the next minute, you gain the following benefits:
-
- You can add your Charisma modifier to Strength checks and Strength saving throws.
- You have advantage on all melee weapon attack rolls using heavy weapons, versatile weapons, or unarmed strikes. However, melee weapon attack rolls against you also have advantage.
- You have resistance to bludgeoning, piercing, and slashing damage.
- When you reduce a hostile creature to 0 hit points with a melee weapon attack on your turn, you can move up to 10 feet and make an additional melee weapon attack (no action required.)
You can end this effect early as a bonus action. Once you use this feature, you can’t use it again until you finish a short or long rest.
Trait: Lycan’s Bloodthirst
While bound to Remus, you assume the savage guise and violent aspect of a lycanthrope: coarse hair covers your body, your nose lengthens, your fingernails extend into claws, and your teeth sharpen. When you take damage from a creature that is within 5 feet of you, you can use your reaction to make a melee weapon attack against that creature.
The Complete Binder is now available in softcover!
