Player Switching Races

[Silly Name]

So, long story short, in my current game one player has recently communicated to me that his character (Human Artificer) has decided that one of his goals is to create a fully robotic body for himself and abandon the weaknesses of the flesh. In game terms, this would mean turning into a Warforged.

Now, as per the homebrewed setting, warforged were a thing back in the remote past, and the player even got to look at what's left of one in a museum, and theoretically the party could retrieve the rituals and machinery to create one... But becoming one seems like a wholly different endeavour. I'm not opposed to it, but I was wondering if there are spells in 5e that could make sense as a basis for such a process.

The party is already quite hectic and almost everyone has some overarching objective to go along with the main plot, and I've really been loving it, so I don't want to just shoot down this idea as I honestly find it quite cool.

[Segev]

Well, there's true polymorph, but that's 9th level and not quite the right feel for what he's going for.

[AttilatheYeon]

Modified magic jar spell?

[nickl_2000]

Don't go with a stock magic spell, make it a special ritual that the player discovers the recipe for. Then they can find ingredients for add they adventure.

[iTreeby]

A ring of mind shielding could do it if you had a brain dead warforged? I'd use a magic item like that to do it.

[False God]

Don't go with a stock magic spell, make it a special ritual that the player discovers the recipe for. Then they can find ingredients for add they adventure.

This right here. Don't worry about RAW spells for this effect. Just incorporate him working towards it by collecting materials, designing parts, I mean, he's an artificer, he should be doing that already.

Perhaps he replaces body parts as he goes along, slowly "upgrading" himself moving through phases of strange to outright horrifying until he reaches blessed machine perfection.

[Segev]

Don't go with a stock magic spell, make it a special ritual that the player discovers the recipe for. Then they can find ingredients for add they adventure.


This right here. Don't worry about RAW spells for this effect. Just incorporate him working towards it by collecting materials, designing parts, I mean, he's an artificer, he should be doing that already.

Perhaps he replaces body parts as he goes along, slowly "upgrading" himself moving through phases of strange to outright horrifying until he reaches blessed machine perfection.

Exactly. 5e modules have a few of these scattered around. In ToA, there's a ritual to bring a zombie back to life with its memories and levels intact, and a ritual to give a whole party flight for a week, both of which are just their own special things with their own costs and requirements.

[Imbalance]

Reincarnate, but ignore the random result. Flavor to taste.

[Whiskeyjack8044]

What kind of Artificer is he? I'd have a series of side quest that each give him 1 racial feature of the Warforged until his transformation is complete. Basically he'd be a cyborg adding parts as he aquires material/knowledge. These could be down time activities.

Just make sure you are showing love to the whole party.

[Whiskeyjack8044]

To expand on my other post, I'd let them replace an arm with an integrated tool and one other body part that corresponds with a skill proficiency (Like an eye if they choose perception). This would be for the Specialized Design feature. Perhaps they design some sort of arcane battery (Like Ironman's Arc Reactor) that keeps them going. Thats is the Sentry's Rest feature. You get it.

[HappyDaze]

Hermit's feature might cover the knowledge of how to do this. If he's not a Hermit himself, he might need to find one...

[Quoz]

This sounds an awful lot like the artificer's version of becoming a Lich.

[HappyDaze]

This sounds an awful lot like the artificer's version of becoming a Lich.

You say that like it's a bad thing...

[Silly Name]

What kind of Artificer is he? I'd have a series of side quest that each give him 1 racial feature of the Warforged until his transformation is complete. Basically he'd be a cyborg adding parts as he aquires material/knowledge. These could be down time activities.

Just make sure you are showing love to the whole party.

He's a Battlesmith, and has actually expressed interest in getting/crafting himself that spiffy arm cannon from Rising from the Last War, so this actually fit in his idea of progressing into becoming a Warforged. However, my idea was that he'd need one last step to truly become a Warforged instead of a brain inside a metal suit, fully transferring his soul and consciousness into the new body, or simply to create an actual warforged body.

I think the rest of the party is also being treated fairly - we try to focus on everyone's goals and sidequest and work them organically into the plot, and so far everyone's been having fun and their share of rewards (Minotaur Barbarian got a nice Dragontooth Greatsword last session, for example, while the Dragonborn Warlock keeps gaining more info on how to break his curse).

As for why I asked for a spell, I guess I should have made it clearer: it'd obviously be a "ritual" (could be a purely technological process), but I'd like to integrate in some sort of "common" magic as a step. Magic Jar is exactly what I had in mind, and learning a way to cast this spell (even if only once) could certainly be part of the quest!

[MaxWilson]

He's a Battlesmith, and has actually expressed interest in getting/crafting himself that spiffy arm cannon from Rising from the Last War, so this actually fit in his idea of progressing into becoming a Warforged. However, my idea was that he'd need one last step to truly become a Warforged instead of a brain inside a metal suit, fully transferring his soul and consciousness into the new body, or simply to create an actual warforged body.

I think the rest of the party is also being treated fairly - we try to focus on everyone's goals and sidequest and work them organically into the plot, and so far everyone's been having fun and their share of rewards (Minotaur Barbarian got a nice Dragontooth Greatsword last session, for example, while the Dragonborn Warlock keeps gaining more info on how to break his curse).

As for why I asked for a spell, I guess I should have made it clearer: it'd obviously be a "ritual" (could be a purely technological process), but I'd like to integrate in some sort of "common" magic as a step. Magic Jar is exactly what I had in mind, and learning a way to cast this spell (even if only once) could certainly be part of the quest!

I want to know what he's planning on doing with his old arm when he cuts it off in favor of the arm cannon. Will there be a little arm-funeral or will he just feed it to a crocodile or something?

[FaerieGodfather]

I would say that this is the sort of thing that Ritual Magic is made for, but Ritual Magic is only ever based on regular spells now, isn't it?

But yeah, reincarnate and whatever polymorph is now seem like good starting places.

[Keravath]

Does he want to create the body and then transfer his brain? Does he just plan to transfer his spirit?

As DM, you need to work out how the process would work so you can enable it for the player. Consider the player's ideas but you need to figure out how it would work and if it is possible in your world.

Warforged existed in the past in your world but was it using a Warforged body to house someone else's mind? Warforged also appear to be immortal or at least no life span seemed to be known. Is this another route to immortality? What would stop every high level wizard trying to find a warforged body? Even creatures who become liches might prefer this option.

Another consideration might be whether the transformation can happen in place. Does the Artificer become a cyborg eventually replacing all the parts with mechanical equivalents or is it the transfer of spirit to a mechanical housing?

Are there any downsides to the transformation?

Anyway, I think you should go the arcane lore and knowledge route with powerful magical rituals perhaps requiring several casters or even casting classes to work together. The simple option that someone mentioned above might be to find a warforged body where the mind has been emptied (or never imprinted) and then use something like a ring of mind-shielding (where when a creature dies their essence goes into the ring) to allow the character to take over the warforged. Depending on what you want to do with it the character could continue to live in the ring and the warforged is only active as a vessel when the ring is worn.

[Sigreid]

I'd be delighted if one of my players came to me with this. I'd start with telling him he needs to find, or put together a top level library to research what is known and rediscover how warforged are made. This would buy me the time to figure out how I wanted it to work and what the steps are. I'd also tell the player somewhere along the line that this is a line of research that could result in catastrophic failure.

[Silly Name]

I want to know what he's planning on doing with his old arm when he cuts it off in favor of the arm cannon. Will there be a little arm-funeral or will he just feed it to a crocodile or something?

Well, they do have a ship... I'll consider giving him a rival in the form of a flying, worry elf if it ever comes to that.

The player is currently going the cyborg route, but we agreed the most that's going to get him realistically and without issues is substituting limbs (in fact, I think it'd be fun to roleplay some infusions as him modifying those mechanical limbs during the morning).

The ring of mind shielding route is definitely a fascinating idea and would work, although it may be a bit different from what he had in mind. I'll put that down as a possibility during his research time.

Warforged are a thing of the mythical past in this setting, and I planned for them to have a darker origin in that an ancient, magically advanced civilisation used the soul of the dead to power those incredible, thinking machines, although they'd erase the memories of the dead soul as part of the process. What the artificer saw in a museum is an heavily-damaged Warforged, which could serve as a blueprint for his mechanical body, but this specific one is in a dormant state, the soul still within its core, and thus cannot be easily "taken over".

In fact, this is the only known specimen in the world. Very few people know the details of that distant past, and it's hard to distinguish truth from myth. Wizards probabibly haven't taken an interest because the information isn't available to most of them, and many don't think it's any different from binding your soul to a suit of armour or a sword.

The ultimate goal for the character, after some research, would be to rediscover the process and materials necessary to create the body, and the ritual to transfer a soul inside of it without erasing memories. I really like the idea of this requiring multiple casters, especially wizards and other artificers.
As for downsides, I might propose some roleplay ones, such as learning to deal with not having a sense of smell or touch, at least like humans do, and getting used to this new body. Obviously he'd lose to stat bonuses he gets from being human in place of the Warforged ones.