Fantasy stasis meets time travel

In all D&D settings other than Eberron, Mind Flayers are from the future, and have traveled back to the past in order to bootstrap paradox their empire into existence, correct? If so, then why do they use the same technology as everyone else in the setting? If they're from the future, shouldn't they have fabulous future technology, like breach loading rifles and epaulets?

maybe they are from an era in the future that is so far ahead that it's devoid of technology?

Why would mindflayer technology be useful and comprehensible to other races?

When an average example of your race is an 11th sorcerer, why wpuld you need a rifle?

Yeah, but that raises questions like "since time travel isn't a psionic power, how the hell did they manage to come back in time?"
>Why would mindflayer technology be useful and comprehensible to other races?
Because they use other races as their servants? Mind flayer technology would have to, in at least a limited sense, be usable by thralls, because if you have to operate your technology on your own, then there's no real point in having thralls.

Well, depends on the setting. The idea that flayers were from the future got bandied about in 3rd edition as i recall then in fourth they established their far reaching empire atop the ruins of the universe in the era after the dawn war.

Your thralls are your food source. Just because cows are useful for brute force does not men we design lightswitches or laptops for them.

You've never seen Terminator? You can only send organic material back in time.

But, really, the bootstrap origin is just from Lords of Madness. It was just such a kick-ass book that people keep talking about it.

The ritual to go back in time consumed all of the super-elder brains of the future.

>When an average example of your race is an 11th sorcerer, why wpuld you need a rifle?
Because your thralls aren't 11th level sorcerers, and there's no point in having thralls if you have to do all the fighting.
Nah, the future thing was established back in 2e's illithad, although in that one it was kept ambiguous as to if it was true or not.
No, but we do design saddles for horses. The point of technology given to thralls wouldn't be to make life easier for the thralls, it'd be to make life easier for the mind flayers. That's why I brought up guns. Yeah, a mind flayer can easily kick the shit out of a party of 5th level chumps that managed to get past its thralls, but you know what would be even easier? If the thralls shot the 5th level chumps dead, and the mind flayer never had to get out of whatever weird squid corpse parasites use instead of chairs.

Mindflayers are directed by the elder brain, a being able to sense and dispatch mindflayers and slaves to where a problem is. Outside of this, they bread monsters to hunt their tunnles to keep out investigation.

Mindflayers fo not think like humans, they are no longer humans. Your thought pattern and theirs will never match up. Even in Eberron where a mindflayer coordinates a city as a mayor, he is insane and considered broken by other illithids. They do not need to create anything besides what they need to complete a task.

>If so, then why do they use the same technology as everyone else in the setting?
They DON'T use the same technology as everyone else. When was the last time you saw an illithid wearing plate armor or using a sword?

they are no longer humans
Were they ever humans? I thought the mind flayer was the squid parasite, and the human (or whatever) whose body it used to be is just a host for it.
>They do not need to create anything besides what they need to complete a task.
If I remember the illithad correctly, don't they have some form of art?
Also, I still think more effective weapons for thralls would be a huge necessity for mind flayers, at least back in the 2e days, because of how darkvisision (or rather, infravision) worked back then. Remember, mind flayers only have infravision, they don't have normal vision. According to the illithad, they're absolutely terrified of undead as a result. Undead are room temperature, so mind flayers can't see them, and they don't have proper minds, so mind flayers can't psionically detect them. The only way for a mind flayer to locate undead is by seeing through the eyes of their thralls. Thus, you'd think keeping the thralls as good at fighting as possible would be a fairly high priority, cuz if a mind flayer colony looses all of the thralls, then a single 1 hit die skeleton could kill quite literally every last mind flayer, and even the elder brain itself.
Mostly they wear robes and wield wands, just like every other spellcaster. The swords are used by thralls. See my previous point as to why I think that's stupid.

>Mostly they wear robes and wield wands, just like every other spellcaster. The swords are used by thralls. See my previous point as to why I think that's stupid.
That's easy. They're more concerned with extinguishing the sun, and less concerned with building an industrial base.

They do, except that "technology" is all psionics. They breed and create organisms to fulfill purposes and enslave others.

Maybe it's a District 9 situation, and the ones that got sent back were actually the retards. Or maybe there was some kind of cataclysm/cultural regression and the current-gen illithids are just aping their advanced ancestor's society while the actual advanced knowledge is lost.

>Mind Flayers are from the future
Not that I am aware of.

That's just another setting option for mind flayers. If it doesn't make sense to you here are your choices: Design mindflayer tech yourself or think of your own origin for your setting.

Basically, because it was a Hail Mary move and it took the effort of their entire civilization just to send something back, not to send something back safely, just to send it back, they likely did have more advanced technology at first, but lack of infrastructure and the ensuing slave rebellions likely put it into that over the centuries

If I recall correctly a lot of their cooler tech like the conquest spaceships and stuff was lost after the rebellion, and the portal back in time thing was a last-ditch effort at recovery. So they retained only their more primitive technology (still more advanced than standard d&d tech) and their advanced biology.

Also they were heavily reliant on Elder Brains as a repository of knowledge, so if a lot of those were killed during the rebellion they probably lost some of their tech through the generations

they do have a lot of weird tech, it's just arcane or psionic in nature.

Pay attention before you post

This, plus biological. Mind Flayers don't really have traditional technology

I believe the current background for the mind flayers is that they had a huge empire across all realities (sort of spell jammer thing) that collapsed when the gith revolted (or possibly that was a byproduct of the collapse).

What is running around now is the remnants of that super empire basically trying to hide out from the gith.

Oh, and the mind flayers aren't really their own race. They are a servant race to the hive mind blobby things and may have actually been constructed or mutated to serve them.

The future doesn't have to mean technologically advanced.

1. The Illithid time travelled Twice
2. Constantly got fucked in the ass trying to ILLITHID DOMINATUS and lost many colonies, and in addition tech
3. Elder Brains, loss of their deity at Tennebrous and the last word
4. Illthestine being only an abstract manifestation of the Illithid manifest destiny and being a pseudo-deity trying to mantle Yog Sothoth Elder scrolls style unintentionally.

Basically, only the oldest and most secretive Illithid Settlements tend to boast the ilk of the 2e Illithiad Sci-fi "Fuck the entire fantasy setting in the ass with these invasive game mechanics" stuff, and since, thing's have saturated and gotten pretty bad for them.

Basically psionics developed in response to the breaching of hte Living Gate by the Dawn War and the ability for things from the Far Realm to breach the D&D universe, Illithids are basically the end point of humanity after some great cataclysmic war between the prime material and the far realm that saw humanity develop its psionic potential to the exclusion of all else, relying totally on psionic powers to do everything in place of technology to such an extent that they can bend flesh to do tasks that exceed beyond the primitive technological need for epaulets.

Also: if an illithid fired a gun it would break most of the bones in their body and they'd just flop into a broken pile of jellied meat dragged behind a head that had to propel itself around using its face tentacles.

Pretty sure that the current lore is that they've collapsed at least twice. They had the situation with the Gith, and more recently (but obviously still ages ago) a similar rebellion of the Duegar.

We know, Aboleth, we know.

In AD&D and partially brought back in 4e thr mind flayers are a space faring race with spelljammer tech, and a considerable amount of planets they use and control for chattel.
The Realmspace book details one of the more remote worlds as well as the way they breed slaves, and why they don't attempt to just go to war to conquer non-spelljamming planets.

Since 3e was trying to pretend spelljammer doesn't exist, they invented the time travel plot.

>Since 3e was trying to pretend spelljammer doesn't exist, they invented the time travel plot.
Except the time travel plot is also mentioned in a 2e book, the Illithad. It's basically just the mind flayer chapter from 3e's Lords of Madness but like, an entire book instead of just one chapter.

Stop trying to shove guns into DnD, fuckwit.