Mind Flayer

Mind flayers, also known as illithids (pronounced: il-LITH-id, meaning "mind flayer" or "mind ruler" in Undercommon), are sadistic aberrations feared by sentient creatures on many worlds across the multiverse due to their powerful psionic abilities. No one really knows where they came from or what their intentions are, as usually like to keep to themselves.

Description

In terms of height, weight, and build, mind flayers were roughly comparable to thin Humans, but it was at this point that any external comparison to humanoids ended. A mind flayer's body was, in fact, a gruesome mockery of the humanoid form. An illithid's flesh, was soft, supple, moist, and rubbery, resulting in an unmistakable texture easily distinguishable from any other creature by anyone familiar with it. Their skin ranged from mauve to greenish-violet in color. Mind flayers that were healthy from brain-rich diets excreted a thin film of slimy, glistening mucus that kept in moisture and gave off a faint odor similar to onions, garlic, or even vanilla, although the smell was imperceptible from afar. Their blood had a silvery-white color.

An illithid's bulging, ridged, elongated head was reminiscent of an octopus, with a cluster of four flexible, unsegmented, extendable, purplish-black tentacles surrounding their mouths. The tentacles could range in length from 0.61 to 1.2 meters, appearing shorter when an illithid was at rest. They writhed and undulated almost constantly and absent-mindedly while the illithid pondered or otherwise was not using them, and flexed in anticipation when sentient beings drew close. They were also incredibly dexterous, powerful, and could be fully controlled by the mind flayer to perform both fine and strength-based tasks.

In many apocryphal descriptions and diagrams, mind flayers were portrayed as having beaked mouths, possibly owing to their octopus-like heads. In reality, an illithid's mouth was more like that of a lamprey, with a circular, jawless orifice ringed by several rows of small, rasping teeth. The tentacles hung above and around their mouths and an oily slime constantly dripped out of their maws. Illithids did not possess exterior ears, rather hosting small, fleshy, ridged holes on both sides of their heads, nor did they have nostrils. Their eyes, sheltered by brow ridges, were uniformly pale and devoid of pupils in addition to being bloated and featureless, similar to those of blind cave fish.

Illithid hands were long, slender, and lacked an index finger, but were otherwise similar to those of normal humanoid creatures. The remaining fingers and opposable thumb were red to mauve in coloration, and their nails were thick and black. Though illithid nails seemed dangerous, they were actually blunt and composed of soft cartilage, and so had little hope of being effective weapons. Illithid feet were webbed and had only two toes, which were also nailed and could flex widely apart, as if to assist in swimming.

Illithids were known to dress in flowing and dramatic robes and cloaks. They were rarely seen without distinctively two-lobed boots, which concealed their webbed nature. They often wore high, flaring collars, dark hats, and various other pieces of ornamentation.

Personality

Mind flayers had utterly alien thought processes and enigmatic objectives. They saw themselves as masterminds that twisted others into serving their own sinister and far-reaching schemes. While some individuals could show extreme variance in mindset, the majority shared many common beliefs and precepts.

Utterly arrogant, mind flayers were elitists who believed all creatures to be inferior to themselves, livestock fit to fulfill only three purposes: to die as their food, work as their slaves, or serve as vessels for more of their kind. Even so, the mind flayers did feel a sense of gratitude towards lesser beings. In truth, they truly appreciated the "gifts" of those they feasted upon, and sincerely felt that they were giving their livestock a gift of their own when they consumed their brains.

The illithids had to dominate not only to achieve their goals, but to fulfill certain basic needs of their own. Without a mind to control, a mind flayer would feel incomplete. They actually had an intimate relationship with their own thralls, suffering when they died (whether by sickness, age, or physical harm) and sometimes going mad from loneliness without their constant companionship. Illithids were known to postpone their other goals just to renew an emptied retinue of thralls and every illithid had at least one personal thrall. When they found one they favored, illithids would go out of their way not to eat personal thralls in bouts of hunger or anger, and might even grant them toys and trinkets to occupy themselves with when not working.

Individuality

While almost every illithid sought the dominion of their race, each was an incredibly intelligent, individual entity with different ideas on how to make that happen. Some would do so with military might, creating grand thrall armies to conquer the world, while others sought to use their psionics to create powerful magic items to use in their quest. Their intentions in given situations could seem bizarre, sometimes to the point of being incomprehensible, but almost every action taken was meant, in some way, to help them achieve their racial supremacy.

Despite their emphasis on order, mind flayers were actually incredibly competitive, as well as individualistic, to the point where they seemed hesitant to work as a team. However, while competitiveness was common, this personal desire for success served to enhance the group overall. Each mind flayer recognized that, in order to contribute to their collective intelligence, every member of the community had to obtain as much wisdom and experience as possible. When the individual failed, the community would put aside their ambitions for the greater "good".

A mind flayer's natural desire to compete, combined with their high levels of intelligence, meant that they were incredibly innovative beings able to come up with unique solutions to their problems. Whether using psionics, alchemy, magic, mundane technology, or some combination of the four, they were creatures of immense creativity and cunning constantly spurred on to reach new heights of individual achievement.

Knowledge

Most illithids understood that knowledge equaled power, basing their existence on vast volumes of shared information, and so the mind flayers sought to expand their knowledge in all fields. They used varied methods to obtain information, always sourcing, verifying, and cross-checking acquired knowledge, for they understood better than any how personal perception and interpretation could twist the truth.

In their thirst for knowledge, illithids bargained, collected, interrogated, spied, stole, and plundered, obtaining their information from abandoned crypts, enemy storehouses, captive minds, wandering traders, and unwitting pawns. Through these activities they collected arcane secrets, forgotten lore, recent news, supernatural discoveries, and items of power. Different illithids placed varying values on certain pieces of information; some believed that there was nothing to be learned from lesser beings, while others thought that all information was valuable.

Illithids had a unique understanding of time in that they only believed that the present mattered. The past was an environment for the eidetic elder brain, a living record who shifted through a colony's collective memory for information relevant to current circumstance. This disregard for the past could become a circular issue; illithids did not care for the past, and so kept no written historical records of their empires or communities, and their lack of hard records made them more indifferent towards the past.

Illithids also had a different concept of the "future" viewing it simply as an inevitable but unrealized part of the present. However, illithids did not believe the future (and therefore their destiny) was set in stone. For example, they recognized that it was possible for their race to die out, which would alter the future, and so complacency was not an option. Only by collecting more knowledge could the illithids accurately predict the future, and thus fulfill their destiny.

Emotions

To non-illithids, mind flayers seemed calm and collected at almost all times, dispassionate and seemingly emotionless outside of their constant desire to dominate others. They dismissed basal emotions like pride as fatal flaws and founded themselves on a pragmatic outlook. While they might occasionally seem furious, it was difficult to discern if this was actual feeling or a ruse to manipulate others. Theories on this ranged from the belief that the mind flayers had no emotions, very few, or extreme levels of self-control, but all of these were incorrect. In truth, illithids had a whole spectrum of emotions and felt them intensely, sometimes even behaving irrationally because of them, but these feelings were almost entirely internalized and not evident even during moments of raging inner turmoil.

However, while mind flayers did indeed have a range of emotions, these emotions were almost entirely negative. They felt anger and hate when foiled and stymied in their ascent to sovereignty, fear when faced with hostile minds they could not control, shame when incapable of controlling minds, envy towards vast knowledge that was not their own, abhorrence towards a wasteful use of thralls, disgust for those that would engage with lesser beings on an equal basis, and sadness when a compatriot died far from home. These emotions, and related feelings such as anxiety and contempt, made up most of an illithid's emotional repertoire.

The most commonly experienced illithid emotion was frustration, discontentment rooted in the fact that they had not yet achieved dominion, and this dissatisfaction was a subtle, undercurrent that constantly defined them and colored their other emotions and thoughts. The same principle of underlying negativity could be found in the illithids overall; mind flayers had no sense of true happiness, and so did not plan to become happy.

The closest most illithids came to being happy was the delight of consuming a brain, but even then the act had such sadistic overtones that it still wouldn't be "happiness" as normally defined. A mind flayer's highest emotional state was that of self-satisfaction, whether that be from a personal sense of pride or the satiation of their curiosity, and it was this that motivated their behavior. They sought to live in luxury, to feast on the minds of well-bred thralls and master their psionic birthright. Love, or even friendship outside of acquaintances, was almost unheard of, for they had supernatural means of filling these emotional voids.

Morality

Overall, the illithids were cold and calculating creatures rarely matched in cruelty and wholly evil. They were known to inflict pain on captives purely for amusement and force others to participate in various gladiatorial games. If an illithid ever treated a member of another race as an equal, it was in all likelihood feigning friendship for its own purposes. They might behave respectfully (though never deferentially) when it suited them, but each had the instinctive knowledge that the other party would serve better as a thrall at best or meal at worst, and chances were that by the time an alliance was formed they had already decided how and when to betray the new partner.

Furthermore, a major factor holding back the mind flayers and blocking their attempts at world domination were their own inherent, self-serving attitudes. Few illithids truly perceived anything, whether cause or companion, worth dying over, and they would rarely put their own lives at risk. Each illithid viewed its own life as supremely important and invaluable, and the most minor setbacks were often enough to drive the unreliable aberrations to retreat in the interest of self-preservation.

Despite the myriad of inherent desires and inclinations that would prevent such a thing, (their dietary requirements if nothing else) it was possible for mind flayers to move away from evil. Most were simply incapable of true good, but on occasion, it was possible for an exceptional individual to change their ways to become morally neutral, and in extreme cases, good. Some were known to question the necessity of dominating the weak and devouring brains, but those in a community who would deny the maxim of dominion were quickly rooted out and would be killed if discovered.

Abilities

In spite of their lack of physical abilities, mind flayers were feared by all beings in the Underdark because of their great mental prowess. In addition to the small array of mind-affecting spells that every illithid had at its disposal to take control of its prey, they also frequently employed a powerful mind blast to affect a multitude of foes. The mind flayer's mind blast was a 18‑meter cone that stunned anyone caught within it.

Their abundant psionic powers allowed them to levitate at will, as well as to detect the thoughts of nearby creatures and to dominate or charm any kind of creature in their vicinity. Additionally, there were reports of mind flayers capable of controlling others by power of suggestion. They were also capable of teleporting themselves to other planes of existence by plane shifting.