Illithid

Illithids are cool; and by cool, I mean totally sweet. They look like tiny little, skinnier, wingless Cthulhus, wear purple robes with high collars and eat brains. Plus they all have psionic powers and are so super-smart even their breakfast is JUST AS PLANNED! They would be totally Mary Sue, except for the fact that they are so brain-damagingly evil it makes them awesome instead of lame (There was one good one in The Book of Exalted Deeds, but nobody gives a crap about her, so let's move on). Their psionic version is much better than their Monster Manual version by virtue of increased versatility. They are also believed to come from THE FUTURE.

The Illithid is considered "Product Identity" by Wizards of the Coast and as such is not released under its Open Gaming License. However, "half-Cthulhu creeps" and "squidface brainsuckers" are totally okay, so go nuts. Feel free to reflect on the hypocrisy of copyrighting a rip-off of Cthulhu. Illithids were actually inspired by a drawing of roots growing through a skull. But that's still a ripoff of something.

Illithid Physiology

Illithids consist of... purple, mostly. Just brains and purple.

Their alien physiology has stumped our crack(addict) biology team even after years of scientific scrutiny. It is thought that if we could crack the mystery of why these skinny creatures subsist on a diet of nothing but fat and calcium, we would be closer to... something.

Look, just look up "aberrant" in the dictionary. We can't offer you much for the time being.

In actuality, Illithid physiology is a moderately altered version of their host organism's body (see mating practices). The brain of the host is replaced by a tadpole thing, and the digestive tract is altered to aid in the consumption of brains and their psychic essence. And of course, they grow tentacles and Sarlaac mouths and lose all of their hair.

Illithid Mating Practices

This morbid fascination of yours is going to get you killed one of these days, you know that?

Anyway, if you've ever seen that Bruce Campbell movie Mindwarp, with those burrowing leech things, you've got a pretty good grasp on what to expect. I'm saying nothing more on the subject.

Unlike the above neckbeard, I will speak of Illithid reproduction. You see, twice in an illithid's life, it will go to the pool containing the Mind Flayer community's Elder Brain (though any briny pool will do), and literally vomit a huge amount of tadpoles out of their mouth (they're asexual like that.) These tadpoles will be nurtured (though the elder brain will eat some of the tadpoles, who themselves engage in cannibalism) over the course of ten years (20 for ulitharids) and once they are ready, they are taken from their pool to undergo Ceremorphosis.

An unlucky creature will be restrained as the Tadpole is brought to it, the Mind flayer carrying the tadpole will place it within the most direct route to the brain (typically the ear or nose) and the tadpole will quickly burrow its way through the skull and into the brain where it will devour the host organism's brain over the course of a week as it alters the host with mind flayer traits. Very, very rarely this process partially fails and no external changes are brought about (though it will still internally be a mind flayer and need to eat brains) in these cases the new mind flayer is used as an infiltrator for obvious reasons.

When the process is complete no form of magic (not even wish or miracle ya cheese loving munchkins!) or psionics can reverse the effects, there is no way to bring back the original host, so he/she/it is for all intents and purposes, dead forever. Though the newborn mind flayer will be physically mature, it will take some time to mentally mature; though its community will be more than willing to assist it in this manner.

If the host is any species besides a human, the result is a half-mindflayer, whose template can be found in the fiend folio. Special cases are present though, placing a mind flayer tadpole into a beholder results in a mind witness (essentially replace the eyestalks with large thick tentacles and the rays of doom with psionics) placing it within a true dragon results in the unspeakably powerful gribbly horror that is the Brainstealer Dragon whose psychic might is only surpassed by the elder brain. Put it in a Roper and you get the Urophion, a creature with a genius level intellect whose talents are wasted on sentry duty (but with their slow, slow, slow move speed they can't do much of anything else.)

If a tadpole is not placed into a host and is placed in the wild, it will eventually eat and grow into a gigantic fucking psychic worm of doom called the Neothelid (think the dune sand worm, only quite a bit smaller and with tentacles and head asploding psychic powers.) Regular Mind Flayers consider it highly taboo to speak about Neothelids, and to actually create one is outright forbidden.

One out of a hundred or so tadpoles will take twice as long to become ready for Ceremorphosis, these tadpoles will create Ulitharids when implanted into a host. Ulitharids are large sized and have two extra long tentacles and much more powerful psionic abilities, they also live for a lot longer than normal mind flayers. Sadly, the only statistics for Ulitharids are for Ulitharid Tadpole-Human combinations, which is a disappointment since an Ulitharid Brainstealer Dragon would have been fuck awesome.

Elder brains are created when a bunch of deceased mind flayer brains are dumped into a single pool filled with a briny solution, these brains will merge and eventually become alive and turn into a CR 25 TPKing horror. There is also an idea that elder brains were created by illithid god Ilsensine, who performed cerebromorphosis on some lesser gods or demigods.

Illithid Society

Illithids function as a hive mind, serving a central, queen-like brain. Other than maintaining this queen, the day-to-day duties of the average illithid consist of evil science and making cheeky wood burnings. The purpose of these wood burnings is an inextricable mystery, as they seem to disappear shortly after their completion. They can make Brain Golems out of buds from said queen-like Elder Brain, which are exactly what they sound like and exactly as retarded as you would think. Even the Illithids and the Elder Brain itself know how impractical this can be, and would prefer to use any other type of golem instead. The Illithids live for the fact that after they die, their brains, and thus their minds, will be merged with the Elder Brain after death. This is, of course, complete and utter bullshit, as the Elder Brain just eats their knowledge and discards everything else. Elder Brains discourage studying magic too much because Elder brains can't eat a mind flayer's magical abilities, though they can eat a mind flayer's knowledge of psionics (if it ever took levels in Psion, Erudite, Wilder, or what have you.) Below the Elder Brain on the mind flayer hierarchy are the Brainstealer Dragons (very rare because it's notoriously difficult to restrain a true dragon) and the Ulitharids.

The Mind flayers have one deity they pay respects to, Illsensine; who did not create them. Perhaps to make up for the fact that Illsensine is the only Mind Flayer God, Illsensine is a very powerful rank 20 greater deity who omnoms the knowledge of everyone the instant they die. The Mind Flayers don't exactly worship Illsensine per se, they just respect it for its great knowledge, and Illsensine returns the favor by considering Mind Flayers to be the only worthy species in the multiverse. This is not to say that there are no Mind Flayer clerics to Illsensine, because said clerics of Illsensine do indeed exist, but their numbers are rather small relative to say the number of Dwarven clerics of Moradin, however; Mind Flayer communities have an exception to their rule of "don't study magic too much" for the Clerics of Illsensine, and in fact greatly respect these clerics and leave them to their business.

The mind flayers used to have another god called Maanzecorian, but Tenebrous (actually Orcus, it's a long story) used the last word on him; so his head asploded.

Some illithids spend their time finding ways to put out the sun, because they hate that bright light shit. Unfortunately for them, putting out a 1,392,000+ kilometer ball of ungodly hot hydrogen and helium is nigh on impossible (unless your name is Father Llymic.) Most other Illithids think that these illithids are wasting their time when it's common knowledge that all they have to do is wait many, many billions of years for the sun to eventually puff up and die. And it goes without saying putting out the sun would indirectly eliminate their food source as well.

Some mind flayers went to the Far Realm and apparently met some weird gribbly abomination called Thoon. However, the exact nature of Thoon is unknown even to the mind flayers themselves, so whether Thoon is a god, an abberration, a philosophy, or something else entirely is open to interpretation. In any case, the mind flayers' encounter with Thoon changed them completely, so they're a lot more irrational and unpredictable (NE instead of LE), they make use of a lot of really weird constructs and altered humanoids (and a variant of the mind flayer that trades the ability to control minds for ninja powers); and for some fucking insane reason a CR 25 Elder brain came back as a CR 15 entity that's totally batshit insane. Oh, and they also seek to gather quintessence for some reason.

Unified Setting Description

• Unified_Setting/Illithid

See Also

• Githzerai