Vex

“We’ve all heard stories of Vex speaking with voices of people we’ve lost. Campfire silliness, stuff to spook newbies on their first night on Venus. The Vex aren’t people, and they certainly don’t become them.”

—Toro-10, Vanguard Scout

No one knows where the Vex came from or what they want, though everyone has a theory. Some say they are from the future, come to reshape the past to ensure their own eventual existence. Many believe they predate the known universe, and invaded our spacetime to escape the collapse of their own. A few insist they are not an alien threat at all, but a concurrence of Golden Age technology projects in robotics, artificial intelligence, and time travel, all run amok. Whatever the case, one thing is clear: of all the enemies humanity faces, the Vex are the least like humans, and the most difficult to comprehend. If a single Vex entity were separated from the Collective, no one can say what its nature might be.

A Collective Disembodied

The Vex exist primarily as interconnected, decentralized thought and information flowing through their vast network, sometimes coalesced into discrete minds for particular tasks. When they require physical manifestation, they occupy hulls, robotic shells of various shapes and sizes designed for different purposes. The humanoid types include small goblins and hobgoblins, typically deployed in numbers as basic combatants; and larger minotaurs, a sturdier hull primarily intended for construction work and architectural maintenance, but also incidentally capable of fearsome violence.

All Vex hulls are constructed identically from interchangeable metallic components, and are indistinguishable from each other, aside from occasional variations in coloration and markings that indicate which divisions of the Collective they belong to.

Treading The Face Of Time

Not only are the origins of the Vex unknown, but when they arrived in the Sol system is a mystery as well. Humans first became aware of their presence during the Golden Age, when exploration of Venus revealed Vex ruins on the planet that predated the earliest human life by billions of years. It may well be that the Vex relate to time entirely differently than temporally constrained beings who merely move through it in a single direction. If the Vex can move through time like a spatial dimension, then even if they were not here before the Golden Age, once they did come, it meant they had always been here. 

Incomprehensible Design

The Vex Collective is inscrutable from the outside. It speaks only through its actions, without explanation or any foothold for inference of cause or purpose. Many Guardians, cryptarchs, and researchers have struggled to understand the Vex, some going so far as to attempt to interface with their information confluxes or even enter their gate network. Such investigative work has a notoriously high rate of fatality, and the Vex remain more or less unfathomable.

Whatever it is like to be a Vex within the Collective, it is surely utterly unlike the experience of existing as a conscious individual.

Vex units of every type share certain characteristics, regardless of hull configuration.

Preset Physical Ability Scores. The frame you choose determines your physical ability scores (Strength, Dexterity, and Constitution), which cannot be changed except by use of exotic items or spells cast on you.

Mental Ability Scores. To determine your mental ability scores (Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma), assign the following in any order you like: 15, 12, 10. Unlike your physical ability scores, your mental ability scores can be altered as normal, such as by increasing them with your class’s Ability Score Increase feature, or by dealing with the consequences of a Curse spell cast on you.

Age. Vex do not age in any meaningful way. Even when residing in hulls for immensely long periods, they are not affected by the passage of time.

Languages. You can speak, read, and write Vex hexinary, and can process any other language after sufficient sampling.

Darkvision. Vex monocular sensors can be tuned to perceive various electromagnetic spectra. You have darkvision.

Radiolarian Creature. Even though you are part of a machine, your consciousness itself is processed in a substrate of living radiolarian organisms suspended in fluid. You are considered a living creature, and you appear on scanners as one. You are immune to disease, and you do not eat or breathe, as all your base needs are performed via chemosynthesis within your radiolarian core. 

Instead of sleeping, you enter an inactive state for 4 hours each day. While inactive, you experience dreamlike sensory episodes. These dreams are a result of memory defragmentation in your machine hull’s data core. After resting in this way, you gain the same benefit that a human does from 8 hours of sleep.

Superior Memory. You are naturally proficient in the History skill, and it benefits from Expertise.

Chassis

Vex have four main hull designs, referred to as the goblin, the harpy, the hobgoblin, and the minotaur. Choose one as your starting chassis. You can change your chassis over the course of a short rest, if you possess a second chassis to change into. Your mental ability scores carry over to the new chassis but your physical ability scores are determined by the new chassis, as normal.

Goblin

Hobgoblin

Minotaur

Harpy