Aarakocra Confinement Hood

Aarakocra Confinement Hood

Concept by Tavaer

This magic hood, resembling a leather falconry hood, was created long ago by a race of bird-people known as aarakocra. Inherently claustrophobic, they created this hood as a means of punishing prisoners. While it has long since fallen out use for its cruelty, they can still occasionally be found on black markets or discarded in dungeons. Upon being placed on an intelligent creature the hood's straps wrap themselves around the victim's jaw, binding itself to their head. While worn, the wearer is effectively both blind and deaf. If the wearer tries to remove the hood violently, or if it is placed on an avian humanoid, the hood manifests additional bindings, including a gag for the mouth, straps to bind arms or wings, and a pair of tethered ankle cuffs with attached bells. All parts of the hood regenerate rapidly from physical damage, but can be removed using standard anti-magic or anti-curse measures. It also automatically detaches from the wearer should they lose consciousness.

To the aarakocra, being bound, blind, and deaf is terrifying to the point of being maddening. After decades of use, some of these hoods were...changed by the perpetual terror of their wearers. These “haunted” hoods function the same as their more common variation on aarakocra, but in addition to sensory deprivation, other races will find themselves bombarded incessantly by the fearful and desperate thoughts of the hood's previous wearers. After as little as half an hour of this torturous exposure, the wearer begins to have trouble telling these memories apart from their own, and their own identity becomes muddled with those of the hood's previous victims. If the hood is not removed shortly after, they may come to believe that they themselves are and have always been an aarakocra. The warped magic of the hood is potent enough that if the hood is worn past this point, the victim actually may even begin to physically transform into an aarakocra! In most cases, this progression of confusion, delusion, and transformation will run its course 120~150 minutes after donning the hood, though strong-willed individuals might be able to hold out for much longer.

Even if the haunted hood is removed, if it has been worn for more than 30 minutes, the assault on the victim's sense of self leaves them in a dazed state for 24 hours, during which they are highly suggestible, and likely to come to believe anything told to them, and are extremely vulnerable to psychological manipulation.