Euso

The Hive Minds

Basic Information

Anatomy

A race of hive minds.
Height: n/a. Size depends on the swarm/hive size. Individual members are never more than half a foot long/tall/wide. Known hives often have insectoid members (e.g. bees, termites) but can also be small mammals, amphibians, or reptiles.
Lifespan
Individual member age can range broadly from days to months. A traditional growth rate/life cycle isn't an appropriate gauge of a Euso's age as a collective can survive indefinitely. However, much like nations can rise and fall due to political, economic, or other factors, a Euso collective will wax or wane based on its members collective response to both internal and external environmental pressures.

General Features

• Size: You are a Small or Medium creature. You make this choice upon creation of your character.
• Speed: Your base walking speed is 25 feet.
• Languages: You know the common trade language and two other languages of your choice.
• Ability Point Increase: Increase your Wisdom stat by 2 and your Constitution stat by 1.
• Trance: Euso do not sleep, or more accurately, the entire colony does not sleep at once. Instead the members of the hive mind rest in shifts for 4 hours a day resulting in the collective remaining semi-conscious of its surroundings. The Common word for this is "trance" as the creature as a whole appears to be inactive and resting but can be roused almost instantly. After resting in this way, you gain the same benefit a human would from 8 hours of sleep.

Optional Variant Features

Choose a maximum of one variant.

Communicative Collective

• Psionic Mind: You can telepathically speak to any creature you can see within 30 feet of you. You don’t need to share a language with the creature, but the creature must be able to understand at least one language. Your communication doesn’t give the creature the ability to respond to you telepathically.

Concealed Collective

• Mask of the Wild: You can attempt to hide even when you are only lightly obscured by foliage, heavy rain, falling snow, mist, and other natural phenomena.

Coordinated Collective

• Pack Tactics: You have advantage on an attack roll against a creature if at least one of your allies is within 5 feet of the creature and the ally isn't incapacitated.

Courageous Collective

• Fury of the Small: When you damage a creature with an attack or a power and the creature's size is larger than yours, you can cause the attack or power to deal extra damage to the creature. The extra damage equals your level. Once you use this trait, you can't use it again until you finish a short or long rest.

Growth Rate & Stages

Individual member age can range broadly from days to months. A traditional growth rate/life cycle isn't an appropriate gauge of a Euso's age as a collective can survive indefinitely. However, much like nations can rise and fall due to political, economic, or other factors, a Euso collective will wax or wane based on its members collective response to both internal and external environmental pressures.

Civilization and Culture

History

The Euso are an eclectic race comprised of a wide variety of hive mind collectives. The collectives are often insectoid in nature, commonly with individual members resembling bees, termites, or stickbugs, but some have also been known to exist comprised of small mammals (e.g. the Poeia-rats of Dremmin-3) or small amphibians (e.g the Croaking Swarms throughout the Raltig system). Given the genetic diversity of Euso collectives, it is unclear where exactly this race originated. Current research into the phenomenon of Euso collectives seems to have discovered a specific group of microorganisms that are common amongst all investigated Euso and, thus far, unique to their race. Although distinct from the more well known Symbiote phenomena, some researchers believe the more exotic aspects of the Euso could be explained by these microorganisms originating from the same planet as the Symbiotes: the legendary lost world of Uilastia.
Although an individual Euso may be comprised of vastly different members than another Euso, each will still share many characteristics including: a patriotic sense of self as a collective, specific rules defining roles within the collective and methods of self governance, limited telepathic communication between members of a given collective or between members of distinct collectives (an encrypted and an open frequency if you will), and innate diplomatic codes of conduct between distinct Euso collectives. A Euso collective functions very much like a microcosm of a perfectly democratic nation state with a free flow of information throughout the collective and rapid decision making based on telepathic consenus of its members' decisions.
Euso are relatively rare amongst the galaxy's denizens and as such, many other races will react with curiousity or wariness towards a Euso. Although each collective of this race considers itself something of a nation state, there is no larger organization of Euso collectives which prevents the race from weilding much political power on the galactic stage. It is unknown whether Euso even perceive galactic matters in the same way as other species do since they sometimes seem to approach interactions with other ndividuals with the diplomatic decorum (or hostility) usually only seen at the scale of relationships between planetary governments. It is also unknown how the race propagates across to host organisms, although some Euso have been seen to split into multiple distinct entities once the initial collective reaches a large enough population. In these cases, newly formed Euso "colonies" often tend to be subservient to their prime hive rather than function as fully independent "nation states" like other, distinct Euso.

Lifespan

Individual hive members: days to months. The hive collective: indefinite.

An example of a bee-ish Euso collective inhabiting Trian space suits:

_{Art Credit: Gabriel Craven, 2019}