SOURCE: Player’s Handbook

Rating the Benefits of Keen Mind

Benefit #1 – 

Increase Intelligence by 1, to a max of 20

This feature allows high-risk, high-reward damage dealing, particularly potent when the odds of hitting are high, but risky if a hit is crucial.

Benefit #2 – 

Always know which way is north

Overland, this feature is useless to adventurers, as there’s almost always the sun or stars to orient yourself with. Underground, on the other hand, can be a surprisingly good way of keeping a party aware of where they are. 

Benefit #1 – 

Always know the number of hours left until the next sunrise or sunset

Portable clocks might not exist in your campaign and are probably rare even if they do. Sometimes, quests are time-sensitive, and knowing the approximate time might just save the party. 

Benefit #1 – 

Perfect recall of everything the character has seen and heard in the last month 

Do you hate note taking? Is your GM an evil sadist who only lets you use information you can perfectly remember? Now you have a way to fight back and get your GM to tell you everything that’s happened in the entire campaign. In exhaustive detail.  

Mechanics and Requirements

Understanding How Keen Mind Functions

An ASI in Intelligence

The first benefit of Keen Mind is a fixed +1 boost to Intelligence. 

Half an ability score enhancement is a useful benefit offered by many feats. Unfortunately, Intelligence is one of the least used stats for most characters, only governing a handful of knowledge skills. 

Several classes rely on the stat, namely Artificers and Wizards, and a few more classes might want to pump it for class features or skills. But for a lot of builds, this is a downside to the feat. We’d have liked to see a floating ASI in Intelligence or Wisdom, but it is what it is. 

Knowing True North

The first real feature of Keen Mind is the ability to know north. Always, in every situation, without a check. Is the character upside down while underwater and grappling with an angry squid? Doesn’t matter. Still, know which way north is. You might have slightly bigger problems though. 

What’s the issue with this feature? Situation. 

See, if the party is outside at all, then a glance at the sun or stars, probably accompanied by a Survival check, should generally be sufficient to find north. In real life, there are multiple ways for a person with barely any training to find north using the natural environment. And that’s in a world where we don’t need to know north because everyone can pull out a smartphone and find themselves on GPS. In a pre-industrial world, even little children probably know how to orient using stars. 

For a character like a Ranger or a Druid, who might live in the wild and for whom this is essentially their literal job, it shouldn’t even need a roll. 

Knowing north becomes much more useful when adventuring underground. Taking bearings and finding north before setting foot into a large dungeon makes navigation much easier, especially when paired with a well-recorded map. 

This goes doubly true if the campaign is pushing through the Underdark or similar environments. 

For most characters, this feature will be an amusing trifle, something to check with the GM now and then. But that one time it saves the party’s hide will make you feel like a king. Or queen. You do you. 

Learning To Tell Time

The second benefit of Keen Mind is the ability to know when the next sunrise or sunset is, to the nearest hour. 

Is this useful? 

Again, like the ability to know north, the answer is a tentative yes, with a huge reliance on the situation. 

Under normal circumstances, the party can probably estimate the time by looking at the position of the sun, or guess at roughly how long they’ve been down in the dungeon. 

But let’s say someone wakes up mysteriously in the middle of the night, or the party is knocked out and captured, or some other situation where indeterminate time has passed. Now, suddenly, the PC can track how long they’ve been out, and that might just give the party some valuable information. For example, if they’ve only been unconscious an hour unless magic was involved, there’s no way they could have been moved far. 

Alternatively, many quests are time-sensitive. If the party has until sunset before the villain executes that innocent princess, then knowing how long that is takes a little pressure off (or adds a ton more, if time’s running out!)

But again, like knowing north, while this is a cute little ability that can add a ton of flavor to a character, it’s rarely going to come up in any meaningful manner. 

However, we do have to point out that if your character is taking part in a nautical campaign, both knowing north and knowing the times until sunset and sunrise is incredible utility if your GM cares at all about realism and navigation aids. 

Total Recall, but Fantasy

Possibly the most useful part of the Keen Mind feat is the effect it has on a character’s memory. 

The feat allows a character to perfectly recall anything they’ve seen or heard in the last month. 

So far, so Sherlock Holmes. Fiction is full of characters with eidetic or photographic memories, and the uses are as broad as your imagination. 

Examples where this might be handy include:

• Remembering documents the PC has seen. Maps, recipes, secret notes, etc. As long as the character gets a decent look at the subject in question, there’s no reason why they can’t remember the details, and possibly replicate it later, with an appropriate check.  
• Asking the GM to clarify specifics on past situations, if the party has more questions after the fact. This can’t be used to ask questions to someone who isn’t there, but things like “In the room with the statues, which way were they facing?” or “Which side of M’me Dupont’s face was the beauty spot” are fair game. 
• Functioning as a contacts list and social butterfly. Suddenly, the PC remembers everyone’s name, and every little interesting fact shared about jobs, families, and relationships, and can piece these all together. This is incredible both from a social perspective, as people tend to really like others who remember these things, and from an RP perspective as it lets the party put together clues about who knows who and what’s going on between them. 
• Perfect recall of places and faces. Does someone have a painting of an interesting building? When your party stumbles across it, you’ll know it’s a match, brick for brick. Catch a glance of someone peculiar across a crowded room? If you see them again, you’ll know

The thing is, though, some real quirks to this feature probably need discussing before a player sits down with this feat and tries to abuse it. 

First off, there’s a limit on the feature’s memory recall. A character with this feat only remembers things “they’ve seen or heard within the last month.” 

How does that work? You have a perfect memory for exactly a month, then suddenly channel Dory from Finding Nemo? 

This asks important questions like; Can a character still remember things past the monthly limit, and what check does that require? How long is a month, precisely? Our calendar has months with 28 and 31 days, after all. 

Most facetiously, is the feat’s poorly worded final section where it says the character remembers things “in the last month” to be taken literally? If your character sees something on the 27th of June, then it rolls over into July, well, that was the month before this one, too bad.

We would also recommend discussing the limitations of the recall with your GM, and how it interacts with note taking and player agency. We’ve heard stories of players asking endless questions about every little thing, and expecting their GM to have perfect recall of their own and an answer for every last query. 

Please don’t do this. As cool as it is to be able to remember everything, you’re taxing your GM’s mental fortitude, and probably eating into the time budget for play. They say with great power comes great responsibility. Well, this is a mediocre power, but there’s still some responsibility involved. Use it wisely.    

Key Stats

The Keen Mind feat gives a character an increase of 1 in their Intelligence stat. While ASIs are normally a good bonus for a feat, intelligence is the least used stat among every class in 5e.

Only two classes (Artificer and Wizard) use Int as their main stat, with a pair of subclasses (EK Fighter and Trickster Rogue) also being reasonably reliant on it.   

Ideal Characters for Keen Mind

Top Classes

Artificer – The Artificer class builds off intelligence, meaning it can make good use of the stat boost. The class itself also tends towards a haphazard grab bag of skills, tools, and abilities. 

Honestly, if any class can make good use of Keen Mind’s benefits, an Artificer laden down with esoteric and arcane knowledge to collate with all of the things they can magically remember is probably it. 

Wizard – Two things matter here. Keen Mind gives +1 int, and Wizards don’t tend to be feat reliant.  

We still don’t recommend picking up Keen Mind as a Wizard unless you have a dedicated plan in mind or the campaign dictates, as the actual features on offer here aren’t useful in many situations. 

Inquisitive Rogue – Incredible skill use and superlative stealth, backed up by incredible reliability in the awareness skills. 

Every Rogue that has a penchant for investigation and the less than legal can probably make use of Keen Mind, but in our opinion, this subclass does it best. Let’s be honest, this build is essentially Sherlock Holmes. You’re going to infuriate your GM with a million questions and a literal inability to be lied to.  

Race or Subrace Choices

Elf – Perception proficiency works great with this feat. High Elves gain a Wizard cantrip; always useful, especially with high Int. The Pallid Elf from Wildemount has advantage on all Investigation and Insight checks, which is even better. 

Changeling – The ability to look like anyone else is an incredible ability when you can perfectly remember what everyone you’ve ever met looks like. 

Kenku – Two things here. The ability to mimic heard voices requires a successful check to decipher, which is essentially illusion magic. And advantage on skill checks to create forgeries and duplicates of documents. Which is awfully niche, but monstrous when relevant.  

Combos, Tactics, and Synergies

Complementary Feats

Observant – First, gain a massive boost to passive perception and investigation that lets you notice everything, so you can remember it later. Second, learn to read lips as long as you can see a creature’s mouth, and would normally understand them, so you can perfectly rattle off conversations from across a room. 

Actor – This is an incredibly specific use, but a character looking to imitate others could do far worse than combining the Keen Mind feat to perfectly visualize the way another person looks, moves, and sounds, then take the Actor feat to gain advantage on mirroring it. 

Spells that Synergize

Arcane Eye – Creating a magical, invisible scouting eyeball to send out into danger sounds like the perfect synergy with Keen Mind. 

Clairvoyance – Sticking to the divination theme, create a stationary magical sensor that stays in one place, and the character can see or hear through. 

Beast Sense – Glue your eyeballs onto a friendly animal and send it scouting for you. There’s a distinct theme, here. 

Strategies for Maximizing Keen Mind Effectiveness

Breaking overland exploration

One of the most interesting uses for the Keen Mind feat is as a way to near-peerlessly track the party’s travels. 

This works by pairing a character who unerringly knows where North is, with the ability to tell time to a startlingly competent degree. 

Factor in that a party should know how fast they move on average, and now a character with Keen Mind should be able to pinpoint the party’s exact position on a map; accurately tracking distance by both time and direction. 

Subterfuge and Skullduggery

Possibly one of the best uses for Keen Mind is its ability to aid in illicit activities. 

• Perfectly memorize the guard patrol routes. 
• Hide in a false barrel transported to the basement and jump out at night time because you know when sunrise is, so everyone’s asleep. 
• Navigate the house despite only seeing the outside because you can always know north. 
• Glance over the lord’s secret financial documents and remember precisely what they say, down to the smallest copper. 

Are any of these realistically going to happen in your campaign? 

Maybe, but probably not. Still, they’re cool little vignettes, and if your party is willing to play along, there’s a lot of fun to have here. 

Find Familiar

One of the most consistently useful parts of Keen Mind is the ability to recall anything seen or heard in the last month. 

We’ve already touched on combining this with divination magic in the spells section, above. Find Familiar follows the same theme. 

Find Familiar allows a character to use the senses of their familiar as if they were their own. Anything seen through your familiar’s senses logically then qualifies for Keen Mind’s recall. 

This is especially useful with familiars that have interesting movement methods to get places others might not expect them to be, like a climb speed. Or flight. Sit your crow outside of someone’s window, and listen in on their conversations. Send your rat scurrying through the dungeon, and perfectly map it out as you go. 

Keen Mind and Wizard Spellbooks

The rules state that a Wizard must consult his spellbook every morning to learn his spells. 

Keen Mind allows a character to perfectly recall anything they have seen in the last month. 

Logically, then, a Wizard that can perfectly recall their spellbook should be able to consult it from memory, yes?

No. As much as this seems like it should work, it’s been clarified by Sage Advice not to affect spell preparation. Them’s the rules, folks. Remember, though, that Sage Advice isn’t written in stone, and your GM might rule differently. The discussion never hurts. 

Final Thoughts on Keen Mind

Keen Mind is bad. 

We could leave the summary there, and you’d know everything you need to know about this feat. 

The big problem is that the things Keen Mind does just aren’t useful except in absolutely specific situations, and most of its benefits can be replaced by mundane abilities both characters and the players piloting them are going to have access to. 

It’s a shame, because what this feat wants to do is interesting, and there’s definitely scope for real power. Just not in its current state. Unless you have a specific build in mind, leave this one in the book.