I want to include a mind flayer in my campaign who is searching for a dangerous artifact to cure its desire for brains. The twist is that he really is good, as my players will surely not believe this and try to kill it.
How do you RP a good member of a traditionally evil race?
Tentative. Cautious. Uses disguises. Perhaps overly concerned for others' feelings.
What is it eating instead? The brains of evildoers? Semi-intelligent monster brains? Is it simply trying to find the artifact before it starves? This choice has an effect.
I've seen this mary sue of an idea once before, mostly it was because of some fluff in some book (possibly not even D&D) that when the tadpole or whatever it's called matures in the hosts brain to become a mindflayer it gains memories and powers from it's host. With this idea the player went that the transformation happened but the mindflayer part incorporated fully physically and only partially mentally and the originally personality stayed besides some instincts and understanding of it's powers. It also helped that this mindflayer saved them by killing another mindflayer and a few thrall guards of the party when it was introduced.
Give him a helpful and unsuspicious profession.
Like physician.
I always like the like one named Mindflayer in Eberron.
He got his jollies by being an authoritarian asshole in a nation of monster who would send for good character to run stupid jobs for him.
Book of Exalted Deeds mentions a redeemed mindflayer monk, who's been able to live without eating brains due to that one monk feature that lets you survive without food and water.
I'd argue this is more of a special snowflake than a mary sue. I think one of the underdark books in 3e mentioned a duo of a good mindflayer warrior and a beholder. Not sure how it was supposed to survive as a good being without eating brains.
I'm honestly not sure. Can mindflayers survive without eating brains? Do they actually die if they don't eat them, or do they just suffer but survive. Maybe it could survive by a magic spell like goodberry or something. The spell says it gives enough nourishment to survive for a day, but maybe that is too much of a stretch to say that covers an illithids brain hunger.
I thought it was a ring of sustenance.
I dunno though. We're talking an implanted brain replacing squid head monster that eats brains from a culture that came from space or the future or some shit that wants to kill the sun so they can live above ground, that is confident in its own superiority because it has fucking mind powers. Why exactly would a mind flayer turn good?
Also I think there's much more relatively conventional DnD ways to not need to eat brains than an artifact. An artifact might make for a better plot though if his goal was to actually change how his whole species eats or something I guess
Make him something of a religious convert, or a visionary in his own right (psionics, after all, he "had a vision"). He could be completely convincing, or he might be just reciting some philosophies over and over in an attempt ot convince himself as well as others "Fish are friends, not food!" etc.
Make him interesting, like he actually has some prophetic knowledge, locations, identities, etc. that keep him from being killed by the PC's immediately. Don't forget illithids are hella smart.
A good mindflayer is a dead mindflayer.
Flayers mainly eat brains so they are better at being part of the elder brain when it is time to join them.
Mindflayers falsely believe they will merge with an elder brain, but really they just die and have their knowledge extracted, much like their own victims (oh the irony!).
Perhaps one finds this out. I'd imagine finding out that your entire culture is a lie based around keeping elder brains in power would make you want to rebel. Since they are already evil, good would be a pretty big rebellion. Also, finding out that you are not really going to be immortal must be pretty crushing.
I've always liked the idea of a not necessarily good mindflayer, but one that was very very open to new ideas and negotiation. Wanted to write a short story about it.
For one reason or another, it was exiled or fled its home, and sought out some small village near an unstable border and after forcing the people to not freak out at the horrible tentacle man, said to the village elders 'here's the deal, I need a place to say, brains to eat and guaranteed safety, I will deal with your murderous bandit and rapey soldiers problems in return for board here'.
It helps build the village up a little, partly for itself, partly as a gesture of trust to the villagers, ends up studying magic in the wee hours since it has little else to do in the downtime between killing and capturing the odd bandit/soldier to consume, children grow up in the village over the years with this bizarre guardian, the initial fear of it is replaced with cautious curiosity. When bands of soldiers move through too large for the mindflayer to deal with alone, the village bands together to make sure it's hidden. Surprisingly, it doesn't try to mentally dominate the village or enslave them because their perfectly normal existence is the best cover it could ever hope for.
So, one day, a huge battalion of soldiers takes up residence for the last desperate push of a stagnating war. The villagers are having trouble keeping the mindflayer safe and secret. A wandering soldier ends up discovering the mindflayer and ignoring the villager's desperate pleas not to kill it, he rushes it with twenty other soldiers. But before they can even come within ten feet of it, dozens of other mindflayers burst from the ground and absolutely annihilate the the occupying force. It had been using captured bandits and soldiers and subterranean humanoids as test subjects using newly learned magical skill to make new mindflayers.
Unsure how it should end, to be honest.
one word:T H O O N
You fucking liar.
>Can mindflayers survive without eating brains? Do they actually die if they don't eat them, or do they just suffer but survive.
According to Lords of Madness, I lit hiss can gain sustenance from other organs and physical tissue, however they lack the ability to taste, and the psychic feedback and euphoria from eating brains is the closest they can get to emotional joy and satisfaction, as such those that go without eating brains for a long time suffer major mental and psychological trauma and degradation.
So really, in order to relieve their need for brains, you need something that can remap their entire neurological make-up from the top down
>YOU MUST GATHER ADDITIONAL QUINTESSENCE
Thoon ruled. I hope they go back to it one day. Also I hope the bring back the tsochar from lords of madness
I like that. Kinda in an ethical grey area, at least for a mindflayer
If that's true then they should just psychicly link themselves to a person while they eat and get the sensation of taste secondhand or something.
Like meditation? :^)
IIRC there was a book (a 2e supplement?) called The Illithiad. In it, they talk about an illithid legend - referred to as "The Adversary". Evidently, sometimes when an illithid slug thing takes over a brain it inherits some of the personality quirks of the host. The Adversary was an illithid that was completely taken over by it's hosts former personality fragments and, while appearing illithid on the outside, secretly moves among them seeking to destroy them all from withitn.
Sounds very mary sue, but maybe that could be a start?
Could work. They do the same in the Ilithid enclaves when brain rations are low.
The sudden reveal of the experiments sounds like a perfect ending. Very Twilight Zone. I like it.
I've been playing a Mind Flayer as Lawful Neutral in a long-running game. The world just got done being ruled by Demons for a thousand years and the Illithid is convinced that the Mind Flayer society at large should have fallen at some point- they're reliant on a large, vulnerable food source, the 'Flayers themselves are few in number, and they're individually powerful enough that the Demons would have good reason to wipe them out.
So now he's wandering the world looking for answers, and a big part of that is working with the lesser races that populate the surface. He's careful to present himself to authority and take whatever steps are necessary to earn their trust, carries a ring of sustenance, favors enormously flashy psionics to subtle control, travels without thralls, etc. Among other Mind Flayers he'd live in disgrace, but those closed-minded fools cannot conceive of what I'm trying to accomplish. It's of no concern.
Recently this character retrieved a divine mantle, and I was interested to realize that he had no real interest in becoming a god, at least not that way. It was the mantle for the god of Halflings, and he was convinced it would mean grubby little Halfling fingerprints all over the inside of his brain.
>So really, in order to relieve their need for brains, you need something that can remap their entire neurological make-up from the top down
Maybe that's what happened. There's Polymorph and a dozen spells that can fuck up a being something fierce with magic in form, alignment, personality... Maybe this Illithid was an experiment on some strange form of spell and got put back together incorrectly? Or is the intended end result of the experiment?
Could be the intended study was in rewiring neurology in order to remove or replace certain behaviors and neurological makeups for another purpose. Neurobiological-corrective magical surgery to be used on another being entirely, and rebuilding an Illithid from the group up was a test of one of the surgery's component spells or study into one avenue of magica biological fuckery. Could have unintended side-effects, though, like turning it from its regular colors to orange or something.
I have a suggestion that you should throw to your DM.
Since you find the existence of Mind Flayers to be an inefficient and parasitic because of their chosen diet and strange relationship with the Elder Brains, perhaps your character find evidence of a hidden population of primitive illithids untouched by Elder Brains who may be less intelligent but whose diet is almost completely brainless.
Or perhaps they once existed long ago and your character find Elder Brain records of their eugenics projects on your character's ancestors. If the dates are accurate, you character might seek a way to travel to the distant past to save a breeding population from the Brains.
Your character might consider defeating the Elder Brains before they transformed all of your ancestors into a race of psionic slaves, but then you would never exist.
Lich Mindflayers (alahoon?) are pretty much as anti mindflayer as one can get.
Maybe make a deathless type one that has settled in a library somewhere to record everything he knows about his race and how to survive in wild space and the other screwed up places between the planes they go.
I had an entire enclave of "neutral" mindflayers in an Elder Evils game where fuckery by some of their wars woke up Atropus. They were not so much interested in stopping the dead god as they were in recording what the party was doing in case something like it happened again.
>in-game retconns via time travel
This sounds like licensed fiction somewhere.
I correct myself: bad fiction in general.
Don't make them good, make them neutral. It is easier to justify and more likely. Think Verconia from Baldurs Gate. Over time they gradually become more aligned to the Light side.
One of the official 5e adventures has a true neutral mindflayer as a random encounter possible as early as level 2.
They just demand everything the party knows about some things, and go on their way.
It's literally the primal zerg from SC2: HotS.
Viconia was evil, and a badly written cunt who kept complaining about getting discounts in stores and not being attacked by guards on sight. She could only become neutral if you were so desperate for imaginary elf vagina you bothered to drag her useless ass along through most of the second game.
So what does a female mindflayer look like?
There aren't any/depends on the host body.
Like one of the weird illithid tadpole slugs in a female host body.
The catch to that is, the Lawful Neutral Flayer doesn't want to replace or destroy the existing Mind Flayers. If anything, he hopes his finished research will earn back any prestige collecting it has cost him.
LN Flayer still believes the Elder Brain holds the Illithid afterlife and all the other lies about Mind Flayer society. If anything, he wants to make sure it won't fall in the future.
The time travel thing isn't off the table for the campaign though, we've run into that before.
>your post
Everything you wrote is false.
Hang yourself elf-hater.
Do any mindflayer know the truth about the elder brains? (That they don't really get immortality)
Like this but with purple skin and a squid head.
That's not kawaii at all
What about emaciated slimy leather-skinned parasites that don't have a gender seemed Kawaii to begin with?
Tentacles
Those tentacles are dripping with digestive fluid, not lubricant. They are for murder, not lewd.
I don't see how those are mutually exclusive
In my friend's campaign, there is a secret coven of mind flayers beneath a major trade city along the coast- it was founded by illithids who found out about the Elder Brains not making them immortal. The group now practically runs the city, but is slightly more humane to the people they rule.
Without the Elder Brain influencing their development and their transformation, they ended up taking on more of the mental characteristics of their hosts and becoming slightly more individualistic. They choose their hosts from "worthy" individuals, and preserve their brains in brain cylinders upon their deaths.
Magic is allowed and encouraged among those who can use it. They worship the Lawful Neutral god of knowledge- because they don't really trust the Lawful Evil god of forbidden knowledge.
They sponsor education and run the morgues in the city- to improve the flavor and nutrition of the brains, and to ensure they can harvest brains without suspicion.
Srs. How mad are you going to be when you pour work into this character and the murderhobo's trash it without a thought.
You can't even blame em, its the safest, sanest choice.
not mad, if thats how it goes that is honestly fine.
What I'm suggesting is not trying to retcon things in the past but instead go back in time to abduct a small population of illithids before the Elder Brains turned them into Mind Flayers.
It is up to your DM how primitive they are and how far exactly in the past you would have to go, but I would make them like Neanderthal/Squidmen that lived at the same time as dinosaurs.
They it's up to your LN Illithid to decide what to do with them once he returns to the present
I'm not suggesting he retcon anything, just kidnap some of his unaltered ancestors and try to uplift them. Any retcon that stops the Elder Brains from uplifting the illithids would undo their own existence and change a lot of the present.
I think it'd be interesting if he went back in time expecting to find a race of noble savages but discovers that the ancestors of the Mind Flayers are Chaotic Evil cannibals.
Here's how I'd play him. I'd initially have him disguised as a human- he helps the party by giving them knowledge, tags along a bit, maybe saves their life a few times- then he hires the party to get the brain artifact or asks them to pick it up for him if they aren't too busy.
He'll be awkward as fuck, maybe forgetting to blink or breathe, he might be overly empathetic (because he can read how someone's feeling), he might feel some disdain towards the meatshields but sort of see the higher-INT and WIS members of the party as equals.
If the party backtracks, occasionally they might find that their kills' heads are missing, or their brains are slurped. But in cases when the bodies were just left there, the corpses are respectfully covered and laid out on the floor, arms crossed. Or given a proper burial, given time.
If discovered, he tries to talk his way out of it- "Look, I don't want to harm or dominate you, I sincerely value you as friends, and the only reason I was doing this is because I don't want to rely on killing people to remain alive."
Same as good vampires. Seek out bad people.
So mind flayer thread?
Whatever you want them to.