Below Upper Lagurno lies the mind flayer sept known as Hidden Lagurno. Few nonillithids who set foot in the spiraling tunnels descending to Hidden Lagurno leave it again—except as mind-dominated thralls.
Hidden Lagurno is virtually lightless. The mind flayers need no illumination, and they hate its presence. The only lighting is for the benefit of thralls, and it’s very dim in areas frequented by mind flayers.
Those with the ability to see the mind flayers’ architecture discern dripping walls carved in twisting, writhing patterns reminiscent of tentacles twining around themselves. Moisture glistens everywhere. Thralls shuffle listlessly here and there, apparently carrying out errands but with no sense of urgency. Silence reigns.
Upper levels of structures are accessible by ramps and stairs, even though not all illithids need them. Sprinkled about the area seemingly at random are stocks built to restrain a humanoid creature by clamping down on its neck and wrists. Observers might realize with some horror that these are the mind flayer equivalent of dining tables.
Although a small community (Lagurno houses only a few hundred illithids and about three times that many thralls, who live in the upper village), Lagurno covers a large area. Passageways are broad and seem to stretch for needlessly long distances between areas. Mind flayers like to have a lot of personal space. They enjoy solitude where they can be alone with only their thoughts and the elder brain’s omnipresence. The vast hallways provide them with solitude in their self-imposed confinement below ground.
Central Plaza
Illithid communities organize around a central plaza. It’s not known if this has always been so or if it’s an outgrowth of their current subterranean existence.
The central plaza is large by subterranean standards, but despite the opulence, an air of ancient decadence hangs over the scene, heightened by the forms of illithids moving silently or conversing wordlessly, their tentacles writhing in a sickening dance.
The main feature of the plaza is a great fountain surrounded by a pool. Smaller fountains and pools are arranged symmetrically around the primary fountain. Some of these serve as baths for illithids to keep themselves clean and their skin moist. Others, especially fountains with wide sprays, primarily function to keep humidity high in the cavern.
The walls and pillars of the chamber are carved so that they seem to undulate beneath their glistening layer of dampness. Ramps circle the walls, leading up to doorways and overhanging balconies.
The walls of this spacious chamber are honeycombed with the illithids’ individual dwellings. Every illithid, even the very youngest, has its own living space. The size and location of each space varies according to status. Living spaces at ground level are reserved for the most esteemed: community leaders, favorites of the elder brain, the most powerful psions and wizards, great hunters, and even popular performance eaters. As the living spaces rise above the level of the plaza, they become smaller, less intricate, and less prestigious. Top-level spaces are small, roughly excavated, and meant for young illithids. Ironically, the highest spaces go to those least capable of reaching them, and the lowest to those that don’t truly need their convenience. This is the elder brain’s concept of motivation.
Balconies and walkways all around the walls of the plaza connect by spiraling ramps, but illithids with the power to levitate float majestically to the levels of their living spaces.
To an outside observer (assuming he could see anything in the gloom), an illithid plaza is unnerving not only because of its alien, organic-seeming architecture, but because of its unearthly silence. Mind flayers in flowing robes walk slowly along the ramps or float telekinetically from level to level while others drift languorously in dark, indifferent pools of steaming liquid, all in near-complete silence. Only the splashing of the fountains and the occasional grunt or scream of a thrall being punished—or devoured—breaks the hush.
At any given time, about twenty mind flayers mill about in this plaza, with thirty more in their living spaces. Approximately the same number of thralls attends them. While thralls are scarce in many parts of Hidden Lagurno, they outnumber illithids in the plaza because common thrall errands (carrying messages, stonework, menial labor, and meal service) bring them here.
Fresh Capture Pit
From time to time, large numbers of captives are brought en masse to an illithid stronghold. The spells and psionic abilities that transform a captive into a thrall include difficult, high-level powers. Enthralling fifty or more captives is a time-consuming process; it could take weeks before all are broken.
While their wills are still free, captives are confined in a pit about 20 feet deep and 100 feet wide with smooth, vertical sides slick from condensation. The only way in or out is to be raised or lowered telekinetically or, if a suitably powerful mind flayer is not available to perform the telekinesis, by a winch operated by thralls.
In Hidden Lagurno, the duergar, drow, and grimlocks confined to the pit live a truly wretched existence: filthy, half starved, and sometimes packed in so tightly that there is no room to lie down or even sit comfortably. They mill about weakly or lie in the filth covering the floor. They find release from the pit only if selected for enthrallment, experimentation, ceremorphosis, to become a meal, or for some other twisted illithid purpose. The greatest number remains in the pit until they are eventually eaten. Depending on the kind of creatures trapped, lethal battles and even cannibalism occur, especially when the supplied food and water are insufficient.
The pit in Hidden Lagurno can accommodate two hundred captives without being stacked to capacity, or three times that number if they are packed in tightly. On a day-to-day basis, the typical occupancy reaches one hundred to one hundred and fifty captives.
Thrall Barracks
Most of the duergar live in Upper Lagurno, serving as camouflage for the mind flayer settlement beneath. The mind flayers of Hidden Lagurno also retain a number of other useful thralls—large, powerful monsters such as ogres, trolls, minotaurs, or even giants that serve as the city’s elite defenders. The sudden appearance of disparate groups of monsters cooperating together could be a clue to the presence of mind flayers in an area.
The thrall barracks are much cleaner and more comfortable than the capture pit. Thralls who have been broken to mind flayer rule are assets, and it’s not efficient to treat them so badly that they can’t work at full strength. Small, doorless sleeping-cells and silent dormitories comprise most of the thrall barracks, which remain quiet and orderly despite the number of potentially hostile creatures forced to live in such close quarters.
Hidden Lagurno’s thrall barracks are home to about one hundred and fifty thralls of various races, including a hundred humanoids (mostly duergar, grimlocks, orcs, and a few luckless humans) and forty giants (mostly ogres, trolls, and a few ettins and hill giants). Minotaurs and rarer monsters make up the rest of the thralls here.
To be fully effective, new thralls need to adjust physically to their enslavement. Thralls might be assigned tasks by the mind flayers that they had no previous training for—as miners, valets, cooks, or warriors. Some are instructed in the fine points of acting as a mind flayer’s personal servant. Others learn to handle a stone drill and mallet, practice fighting with dulled weapons, or are simply taught to receive punishment without crying out.
Illithids place very little value on the life of any individual thrall, but they abhor wastefulness. A thrall that kills itself and possibly others by causing a tunnel under construction to collapse has wasted not only its own life (a demonstrably useful commodity) but also the lives of other trained thralls and the time needed to redo the work. Consequently, the barracks include large classrooms and training pits, where new thralls train for the work they are destined to perform as slaves. In some cases, thralls are brought back for retraining if they prove unsuitable for their assigned work because of advancing age, physical infirmity, injury, or a rebellious temperament (though thralls in this last category more often than not end up on the menu). The mind flayers have developed a highly effective program of rewards and punishments to spur training. By the time a thrall completes its indoctrination, it is docile, ready to work, and eager to please. Older thralls carry out most of the instruction, under the supervision of five mind flayers.
Bazaar
When goods are brought in from outside, they are “sold” in the bazaar. Here mind flayers purchase fine cloth or tailored clothing, meat and other food besides brains, psionic or (rarely) magic items, books, furniture, and all the other necessities of daily life and study as a mind flayer.
This area is instantly recognizable as a market. Tables bearing goods of every variety line the chamber in orderly rows. Merchants with wares to sell haggle soundlessly with customers over goods and services. The “merchants” are duergar thralls who purchase goods from outside vendors in Upper Lagurno. Merchants of other races are not brought into Hidden Lagurno, except as thralls.
Despite their alien nature, mind flayers carry on the business of buying and selling in a familiar way. The chief difference is that mind flayer communities operate without money. Their economy is based on a complex system of barter for services, favors, or training. Cheating and fraud are impossible because the elder brain makes note of every transaction and enforces the system. It’s not uncommon for a mind flayer to owe dozens of debts and be owed just as many in return, with no doubt that all will be paid.
Although they have no need for money, some illithids do accumulate gold, silver, and other forms of treasure for its beauty, for its usefulness in procuring objects from other races, or because of an innate desire to hoard. This acquisitive behavior is not considered aberrant unless it becomes obsessive.
This chamber forms a stadium. A stage occupies the lowest, central spot, with stone benches arranged in a semicircle above it. The stage features a wooden stock shaped like a small table with a hole in the center. The tabletop is hinged so that it can be opened like horizontal stocks and then clamped around a person’s neck, with the trapped person facing the audience.
Illithids need one brain per month to meet their minimum physiological needs for survival. Many eat more than that, depending on their status within the community and their personal success at hunting. Even the most compulsive brain gourmand is restrained by the need to protect the community’s whereabouts and by the elder brain’s commanding presence.
The fact that mind flayers can exercise control in their appetites does not lessen their hunger for more brains. They have arrived at a peculiar solution to this problem: performance eating.
Illithid performance eaters train to extract every possible nuance from the eating experience. They give careful consideration to how the victim is fed and treated prior to the performance, how it is restrained during the performance, and the physical process of extracting and consuming the brain. This exquisite culinary event is shared with the audience through telepathic means, so that every illithid in attendance experiences the meal as if it were the one eating the brain.
Adventurers captured by illithids often suffer this fate. Their unusually active, exploit-filled minds are widely acknowledged as the most delightful to illithid senses. Further, free minds that have never been enthralled are considered superior to those of slaves. Through performance eating, every mind flayer in the community can experience the thrill of eating such a fine brain.
Much of the time, this auditorium is empty. Eating performances occur several times a week, but most are small events with only a dozen or so mind flayers in attendance. Large, multimeal special events that draw most of the community occur perhaps once every two weeks.
The hall also hosts other activities including lectures, demonstrations, debates, and even theatrical performances. Sometimes thralls are forced to perform classical plays.
Laboratories and Workshops
These rooms could be the well-stocked labs of any college of wizards or alchemists. They are filled with books and scrolls, bubbling beakers, complex mechanical apparatuses in varying stages of completion, and cadavers and body parts that appear to be the objects of study.
Mind flayers are curious; it is one of their few admirable qualities. When they turn their powerful intellects to a problem, they investigate all potential channels for solving it—psionic, magical, and scientific. Illithids can be found working on any number of devices in their labs, some of which would horrify any nonillithid investigator. On a typical day, ten illithids occupy the labs, along with fifteen thrall servants and another ten to twenty thralls being used as test subjects.
Nutrient Vats
Dozens of stone vats, each the size of a large laundry tub, dot the floor of this chamber. Occasionally, a bubble rises slowly to the surface of one of these steaming pots, struggling to burst through the skin that forms atop the fluid and befoul the air. The floors and walls are streaked with dark stains. A dozen thralls wearing masks stir the fetid tanks or add matter to the stew.
Mind flayers derive vital psychic and physiological sustenance from consuming brains, but their bodies also need larger quantities of “normal” nutrition to survive. Some of this comes in the form of meat no different from what a human or dwarf would eat. Most of it is ingested in the form of a nutrient soup fermented in these vats. Proteins in many forms are added to the tanks, then siphoned off for consumption when “ripe.” Mind flayers derive pleasure only from eating brains. All other consumption serves to keep the body functioning and healthy but it is not a source of enjoyment.
If a character dares to eat “illithid stew,” he must make a DC 14 Fortitude save or be nauseated for 10 minutes.
Temple of Ilsensine
The far end of this long, gently curving hall features an idol of a massive, disembodied, floating brain trailing long ganglia. The stone tendrils twine across the floor in confused knots before separating at regular intervals into rising columns that seem to writhe toward the ceiling. Braziers of incense fill the air with a scent of spices so cloying it overwhelms the lungs and stings the eyes.
This carved image of Ilsensine is believed by mind flayers to be a very good likeness and approximately life-size. Since illithids don’t truly worship the deity, they wander in only as the mood strikes them to make sacrifices or request boons.
Chambers attached to the central temple house the five clerics and seven acolytes that serve the god. These clerical mind flayers seldom leave the temple sector. On rare occasions, they conduct processions through the central plaza or to extract their pick of the thralls and captives from the pit for unknown purposes. Sometimes they move silently through the community on unknown errands. Their purposes and accomplishments are not well understood by other mind flayers, but the elder brain sanctions everything they do, so their activities are not questioned.
These servants of Ilsensine have no cleric levels at all. Two are sorcerers; the others are simply normal mind flayers trained in the lore of Ilsensine, choosing ranks in Knowledge (religion) in preference to other fields of learning.
Birthing Pods
Ceremorphosis is not an easy process. The body suffers fits of madness, delirium, terrible convulsions, and worse as the brain is slowly devoured. When a tadpole is implanted into a host body, it is brought to this moss-lined chamber to complete the week-long transformation. At least one mature illithid and one or two thralls watch over the twitching, convulsing body to prevent it from injuring itself and to occasionally wash the filth from its body when it momentarily stops thrashing.
Mind flayer “births” are rare, so most of the time, these chambers are empty. They could be used for more than one ceremorphosing tadpole at one time, but that seldom happens.
The Pool of the Elder Brain
The elder brain lives in a pool that dominates the center of the chamber. The pool is about 10 feet deep and 50 feet in diameter, surrounded by a wide lip intricately carved with images and Qualith inscriptions. The liquid in the pool is dark, swirling, and foul smelling. Countless small shapes (illithid tadpoles) swim to and fro in the murk. At the bottom of the pool, the formless mass of the elder brain stirs listlessly, seen more as a shadow than a discernible shape.
Mind flayers regard the protection of the elder brain against direct attack (mainly from githyanki and githzerai, their most implacable foes) as the most important duty of the sept. Unlike other chambers in Hidden Lagurno, the pool of the elder brain is protected by a large, sturdy door that is kept barred and psionically sealed from the inside. Anywhere from three to five mind flayers are constantly in attendance in this chamber, minding the pool and ready to respond to any request the elder brain might make. Normally, only mind flayers are permitted to enter, but on rare occasions, the elder brain indicates that particularly interesting captives should be brought before it for inspection and questioning.
The room is guarded by carefully renewed dimensional lock and screen spells, designed to prevent sudden teleportation assaults or spying on the chamber. The elder brain itself is far from defenseless, of course. Its terrible spells and psionic powers can quickly scour its chamber clean of life, if need be. But it is essentially immobile, unable to leave the confines of its pool, and its survival depends on the mind flayers that serve it.