Abducted & Experimented On

[virtualslayer22]

Fellow adventurers!! Greetings! I have begun a new low level campaign for some fresh DnD meat. We are a mere 4 sessions in, but they’ve somehow managed to be abducted by an alien (well, an Illithid who snaps in and out of dimensions in his “spaceship”) who conducts experiments on the specimen he collects. Often, he simply dissects creatures to learn, but when he captures more…promising creatures, we’ll be just can’t help but try to enhance them a bit.

Anywhosits, I’m trying to decide on what “enhancements” my players will get. I’ve boiled it down to adding a feat or two for each of them (ie tough or athlete, etc) that enhances an ability, OR giving them a tattoo from Tasha’s, OR bringing something original to them.

Would love some brainstorming and open to any ideas many of you may have as to how I could do this. Not trying to break my game, so I’m also open to drawbacks to these abilities (ie level of exhaustion after use, or losing walking speed after, something silly, etc).

The party consists of the following:
Half orc barbarian bear totem
Half elf fighter battle master
Firbolg Cleric twilight domain
Warforged Ranger hunter
Wizard Bladesing

Hope to have a great thread and thanks in advance!

[Mastikator]

Okay so I just so happened to have created 7 "Illithid Boons"/free feats for my players to receive as reward for saving a powerful mindflayer (instead of killing it). Here are the boons you can use as inspiration or just steal. I based them off the mind flayer stat block/theme, each player was allowed one and each one was only allowed once.


Detect Thoughts: cast detect thoughts once per day without components
Levitation: cast levitation on self once per day without components
Force of personality: advantage on all charisma saving throws
Limited telekinesis : cast invisible mage hand without components
Limited telepathy: cast message without components
Manipulation: gain proficiency in insight and deception.
Mental fortress: advantage on all intelligence saving throws.
Mind blast: as an action you can magically emit psychic energy, each creature in a 60 feet cone must make an intelligence saving throw or take 4d8+4 psychic damage and be stunned for 1 round, or take half damage on a failed save. The DC for the saving throw is 8 + proficiency modifier + intelligence modifier. Once this ability is used it can not be used again until you eat a humanoid's brain that has not been dead for more than 10 minutes and is not destroyed. (yes it's the most powerful, twisted one, and it requires that the player becomes a cannibal, you can skip this one if it's not appropriate for the campaign)