flay

Cascading.

Elder Brain

Concept art for Baldur's Gate 3

Crawler pots

Porcelain

Available on www.roseschmits.com

apparently I can get things done efficiently and concisely, just not for things of academic or monetary value.

anywho, mind flayers are neat. All of these are taken from the Mind Flayer Forgotten Realms wiki page with some commentary on my part and desperately hyper-fixating on BG3 and Gale specifically.

Appearance

Mouths are similar to lampreys just with thick slime dripping out (horrifying)

Tentacles can extend and are considered "incredibly dexterous and powerful" (cold showers, all of you)

Skin is slimy with mucus which can smell of garlic, onions, or vanilla when well fed.

Webbed feet may mean they are adept swimmers.

Blood is silvery-white.

Personality

Constantly seeking new information or re-checking old ones to see if they're still accurate (college in a nutshell)

View themselves as the supreme race that are actually helping other races by enthralling them, eating them, enslaving them- yeah I can see how Lovecraft inspired them.

Mind flayers can get very attached to their thralls, feeling "incomplete" without one, feeling pain when they die (whether emotional or physical is not described), and can lose their minds without one. They may play favorites, giving their favored one gifts. They also feel emotions very intensely, where they may behave without thinking (and I have another terrible role model for BPD /j)

Very, very, egotistical and ambitious. Their egos make it difficult to work together without the help/control of an elder brain. Wish to dominate every plane of existence, control everything, KILL THE FUCKING SUN (sometimes), and reestablish the Illithid empire.

Rumors

There are various species under the branch "Illithidae" AND I NEED TO KNOW THE ENTIRE ZOOLOGY OF THESE THINGS, WHERE IS THE $700 TEXTBOOK?

Nobody knows where the fuck they came from, how the fuck they got here, and when the fuck they showed up.

Abilities

Can teleport to other planes.

Can craft artifacts usable only by flayers or thralls.

Despise arcane magic (except for a few renegade illithids). Sorcerer mind flayers are not very common, but are much stronger than most mind flayers.

Culture

Flayer colonies can range from 200-2,000 (not counting thralls, slaves, farms, etc.) Colonies are hiveminds under the control of an elder brain.

Colonies are tiered through individuals, creeds, and elder concords. If several colonies share a goal, they will form a Grand Elder Concord.

Inquisitions are essentially mind flayer adventuring parties, cults are bigger inquisitions that go on more dangerous quests.

Renegade illithids are mind flayers with their own free will when separated from their elder brain and can establish their own colonies (sometimes turning into an elder brain themselves, Emperor, I am watching you).

Nobody knows how to make Nautiloids anymore, sad days.

Don't typically worship deities aside from Ilsensine, which is a more abstract idea with a few appearances from their image here and there within battles. There is also Maanzecorian, which seems to be a figure of knowledge and secrets, but seems to have been killed (somehow) in 14th century DR, although colonies following it reappeared in late 15th century DR.

They seem to enjoy and produce art with patterns and geometric shapes that give off emotions when viewed by other mind flayers (I need to see illithids debating art, PLEASE fight over Picasso)

Mind flayers have experimented with constructs and biological matter (experiments regarding ceremorphosis on different races and species will be discussed later), including cranium rats, golems, intellect devourers, and mind worms (WHICH ARE BIG ASS WORMS THAT LIVE IN WATER, ABSOLUTELY FUCKING NOT)

Typically respected by Underdark races, do not get along with gith.

Biology

They do not need thermal energy from the sun to survive, and can thrive from the heat within planets (put them in a heat wave)

Do not like bright light (pissing off the Emperor by clicking a flashlight on and off in its face), can see two extra colors in the spectrum.

Cannot smell.

I found an entire list of how different brains taste to them.

The reasoning behind flayers eating brains is that they need hormones, enzymes, and psychic energy, all of which found in brain tissue. They do also require water, and can eat organs to get enzymes and hormones- they mainly need psychic energy, which is apparently found in grey matter.

Mind flayers are sexless (non-binary hivemind, we love it) but may lay a clutch of eggs within their lifetime (WHO LAID THE EGGS THAT PRODUCED THE TADPOLYCULE? EMPEROR OVIPOSITION CONFIRMED??? HOW FUCKING MANY DO THEY LAY IN A SINGLE CLUTCH? ARE THEY LIKE WHIPTAIL LIZARDS????)

Tadpoles are kept for 10 years until they reach maturity, in which they are assisted by caretakers into ceremorphosis. If they do not go through this process for any reason, they could become illithocytes or neothelids, neither of which are well-liked by mind flayers.

Now for the ceremorphs/flayer-kin

anywho I love taking notes on stuff, expect plenty more as I research more of the stuff in BG3 for the fancomic :3

also Gale is absolutely fucked if he marries a mind-flayer, sorry to say, he's getting eaten and not in the fun way.

Like this is the first time I ever actually read through it, normally I'm more interested in the monsters, Ancestries, Classes/Subclasses, Spells and equipment when it comes to DnD books.

But I've read through The God-Brain's section of Bluetspur and it mentions The God-Brain's research had an unexpected result, a truth so mind-bendingly alien to it that it went crazy from it.

Which got me thinking because it sounded really familiar: the idea of an Ilithid Elder brain going bonkers after being exposed to something.

Because it brought to mind The Thoon. Which was introduced in 3.5E's Monster Manual 4 or 5.

Basically the background of Thoon Mindflayers is that at one point, an Elder Brain when on an expedition to the Cavern of Thought in the Deep Caverns.

For those of you who don't know, the Deep Caverns are a place in the Astral Plane where all the Gods of the Aberrant Species dwell, The Beholder's Great Mother calls the Deep Caverns home.

And so does The Mindflayer's own God, Ilsenine. Which was a massive surprise for me to learn that the Species of Psionic squid-faced Aberrants with a detest for Magic actually worship a God.

That was until I learned that it was Arcane Magic they hated.

Basically you don't go to the Deep Caverns if you value your sanity.

So. Anyways, back on track: The Elder Brain goes on the expedition and something happens to it during that time, what exactly happened is unknown.

But when the Expedition returned, The Elder Brain was basically just ranting about The Thoon.

What The Thoon is, isn't made cleary: it could be a God, it could be a philosphy or anything. But as a result, The other Elder Brains booted this corrupted Brain from the collective.

But this Thoon Brain started gathering followers and started going on the hunt for this mysterious substance called Quintessence.

And it's through this Quintessence that they basically go from just pure bio-mechanical tech to a mixture of bio-mechanical and regular weird ass tech.

The Thoon are pretty cool; as a result of their use of Quintessence, they've got a bit more variety to them than regular Illithid collectives and The Quintessence is pretty much meant to be used as an flexible plot hook.

The Thoon could be mining it from a nearby mine, or abducting people and turning them into sleeper agents in order to extract the stuff from the local population of a town or what have you.

But it got me thinking: what if this revelation The God-Brain came across that led to it going crazy and start eating it's own kind in order to ascend.

Was The Thoon and instead of becoming dedicated to it like The Thoon brain did, The God-Brain instead tried to ascend to Godhood for some reason?

I mean, it's just as likely that The God-Brain discovered something as equally as mind-breaking to it as The Thoon was to The Thoon Brain.

The Mind Flayers, to my knowledge at least, don't exactly come from The Far Realm. They, in 3.5E at least, come from the fucking future and travelled back in time to try and get their empire started.

It's also why Aboleths don't like them (at least in 3.5E): Aboleths have a genetic memory dating back to the dawn of time. They've seen the creations of everything else in the Multiverse.

Then one day these squid-faced fuckers with psychic abilities and a penchant for sticking their babies in the heads of other living creatures just randomly pops up seemingly out of nowhere.

I'd be a bit confused as to where the fuck these things came from too if I were an Aboleth.