Worldbuilding the Unknowable

[TheArcaneWeirdo]

A hive mind is a society that acts as one body rather than a collection of individuals. But a body has different organs, doesn't it? I think the differences between a blood cell and a skin cell are a lot more essential than, let's say, the differences between a cook and a programmer: A cell's function in the body is its entire existence, while individuals have life outside of their professions.
The dead mindflayers added to the Elder Brain are clearly the brain cells.
What else?
Who are the bones, the blood, the liver, the lungs, the tendons, the tentacles?

Just for the record, I like your organ metaphor better than my cell metaphor.

It's the same idea, I just took it a little further.

[TheArcaneWeirdo]

So what edition are we doing this?
I prefer 5e, cause
1) That's the edition I know best and actually play
2) There's already ton of mindflayer stuff in older editions.

[Pizza]

Here's an idea:

A hive mind is a society that acts as one body rather than a collection of individuals. But a body has different organs, doesn't it? I think the differences between a blood cell and a skin cell are a lot more essential than, let's say, the differences between a cook and a programmer: A cell's function in the body is its entire existence, while individuals have life outside of their professions.
The dead mindflayers added to the Elder Brain are clearly the brain cells.
What else?
Who are the bones, the blood, the liver, the lungs, the tendons, the tentacles?

What if every mindflayer salient ability is tied to one role in the colony, which is analogous to one organ?
For example, the 'teeth' harvest brains for the rest of the colony, so they have some sort of 'Improved Extract Brain'?
While the 'skin' generates psionic force fields to protect the colony from invaders?
The 'eyes' are obviously related to spying, but as observers only, not assassains. It's hard to directly spy when you're obviously, visibly alien to the people you're spying on, and shapeshifting is already taken by way to many monsters. It makes a lot more sense for mindflayers to use local humanoid agents. Maybe the 'eyes' can access the senses of people they've previously mind-blasted, seeing through their eyes, hearing through their ears etc*?
The blood is responsible for disturbuting the body's resources. So maybe 'blood' mindflayers have teleportation, making it easier for them to act as messangers?
The nerves, on the other hand, deliver information between the brain and the body - so maybe 'nerve' mindflayers can maintain telepathic connection with multiple people at once and for extremely long ranges, maintaining the hive mind outside of the Elder Brain's normal range and passing commands and reports?
The tentacles grasp things, so maybe 'tentacle' mindflayers are the ones capturing and controlling thralls, and are able to maintain control on multiple ones for hours?**

Obviously we should double-check and adapt it to mindflayer anatomy where it's different from human one.
per day.[/b]

I’m not sure it really matters, but to some extent this sounds closer to a colonial organism that a traditional multicellular organism in that the body has all these cells, each somehow alive individually and capable of doing any of the necessary life processes, but they live together in one body each sort of performing a specialized job in maintaining life for all of the,, but the body itself isn’t really one organism. I probably explained that wrong as I never really got the idea. The traditional example from textbooks is the Portuguese man o’war, but looking at the Wikipedia entry I’m not sure even they’re really considered to be this sort of thing anymore.

[Pizza]

.

Also, there is precedent within D&D as a whole for individual mind flayers to NOT be closely tied to a hive mind, for example, Estriss from the Cloakmaster novels. There's nothing saying that you can't declare your Bluetspurean mind flayers to all be part of a hive mind, but it's worth explicitly declaring such baseline assumptions just to reduce potential confusion for your readers.

Combining the idea of specializing mind flayers with the idea of non-hive mind flayers... perhaps the Elder Brain infrequently, intentionally causes the creation of an illithid with greater independence. (The limitation to this salient ability might well be a psionic kill switch just in case the independent illithid goes rogue.) Just as the Bluetspurean illithid's mind is meant to be unknowable to the human mind, the reverse is likely true. Perhaps a free-willed illithid is useful for infiltrating human society.

There is almost a necessity for something like this for the propagation of the species. The colony is propagating the welder brain which itself started as a tadpole that took over a host and somehow grew to become an elder brain, but why would the existing elder brain that made the tadpole allow another elder brain to come into existence. Maybe a replacement near the end if its life, but an elder brain to go start its own colony which seems to demand a separate identity to really exist?

So maybe there’s a few possibilities. Maybe sometimes a mindflayer gets cast out. Like the flayer virus that afflicts some Necron dynasties in WH40k, maybe there’s some sort of mindflayer cancer or sickness that the elder brain has to cut off from the hive mind to protect the hive mind. Maybe its method spreading is not understood beyond the knowledge that potentially any contact even fighting the thing psionically might spread it throughout the hive mind. So go you’re free for better or worse just don’t come back here if you ever cared about the hive mind because even killing you might be dangerous to the rest of us. Of course somehow this is an essential part of the propagation of the species as whatever issue the afflicted mindflayer had isn’t dangerous but just a means to cause the elder brain to send a bud or a seed out into the world to start down the path of becoming an elder brain itself and starting its own colony.


Or maybe there is outside interference. Surely enough distance or some sort of psionic or magical powers might sever the connection to the hive mind and at least a few Mindflayers who go through this survive, but they can never go back and rejoin the hive mind. Maybe it is just impossible, maybe the elder brain to too suspicious to trust the severed mindflayer. Now it too is out on it’s own with the potentiality of becoming an elder brain laying in front of it.

[TheArcaneWeirdo]

.

Also, there is precedent within D&D as a whole for individual mind flayers to NOT be closely tied to a hive mind, for example, Estriss from the Cloakmaster novels. There's nothing saying that you can't declare your Bluetspurean mind flayers to all be part of a hive mind, but it's worth explicitly declaring such baseline assumptions just to reduce potential confusion for your readers.

Combining the idea of specializing mind flayers with the idea of non-hive mind flayers... perhaps the Elder Brain infrequently, intentionally causes the creation of an illithid with greater independence. (The limitation to this salient ability might well be a psionic kill switch just in case the independent illithid goes rogue.) Just as the Bluetspurean illithid's mind is meant to be unknowable to the human mind, the reverse is likely true. Perhaps a free-willed illithid is useful for infiltrating human society.

There is almost a necessity for something like this for the propagation of the species. The colony is propagating the welder brain which itself started as a tadpole that took over a host and somehow grew to become an elder brain, but why would the existing elder brain that made the tadpole allow another elder brain to come into existence. Maybe a replacement near the end if its life, but an elder brain to go start its own colony which seems to demand a separate identity to really exist?

So maybe there’s a few possibilities. Maybe sometimes a mindflayer gets cast out. Like the flayer virus that afflicts some Necron dynasties in WH40k, maybe there’s some sort of mindflayer cancer or sickness that the elder brain has to cut off from the hive mind to protect the hive mind. Maybe its method spreading is not understood beyond the knowledge that potentially any contact even fighting the thing psionically might spread it throughout the hive mind. So go you’re free for better or worse just don’t come back here if you ever cared about the hive mind because even killing you might be dangerous to the rest of us. Of course somehow this is an essential part of the propagation of the species as whatever issue the afflicted mindflayer had isn’t dangerous but just a means to cause the elder brain to send a bud or a seed out into the world to start down the path of becoming an elder brain itself and starting its own colony.


Or maybe there is outside interference. Surely enough distance or some sort of psionic or magical powers might sever the connection to the hive mind and at least a few Mindflayers who go through this survive, but they can never go back and rejoin the hive mind. Maybe it is just impossible, maybe the elder brain is too suspicious to trust the severed mindflayer. Now it too is out on it’s own with the potentiality of becoming an elder brain laying in front of it.

An Elder Brain is made not of a single mindflayer, but of the entirety of the colony's deceased. Every illithid joins their colony's Elder Brain upon death.

I'm pretty sure the distance limit for connection to the hivemind is canonical.

[TheArcaneWeirdo]

I think there's a thematic decision we need to make:
How much do we play traditional cosmic horror tropes straight here, and how far do we go playing with them?

Cause from what I realise, the Lovecraftian paradigm is
1) The world is full with alien and unknowable things, and that's terrifying.
2) We're but ash and dust in the grand scheme of things, and thus meaningless.
3) Internalising that would break your mind completely and permenantly.

The thing is, I disagree with everything on the list.
In my opinion,
1) The world is full with strange and mysterious wonders, and that's the beauty of it. There are real-life creatures weirder than anything DND could come up with, and they're cute AF. There are people whose view of the world is completely opposite to yours, and they're still trying their best to be good people the way they see it.
2) I honestly have no idea what meaning I have in the grand scheme of things, but I think even if there's none, we can create our own meanings. I dream of fame, of a great destiny, of changing the world for the better - but even if none of that is possible or meaningful, I'll get over it. As long as one reader was inspired by my words, I was meaningful to them, and that's meaning enough to me.
3) There are events that can seriously harm one's psyche, but that doesn't have to be the end of the world. Some of the coolest people I know deal or have dealt with mental issues of some sort. They're still legitimate people with thoughts and feelings and desires.
Moreover, I think what Lovecraft is describing is often not real trauma, but simply the despair of realising for the first time how much you don't know, how much what you thought was simple and obvious is actually complex and chaotic. And this really is a terrifying feeling. But if you let yourself stay with it for a little longer, if you're willing to accept your own ignorance for long enough to keep learning, most of the time it's wisdom, humility and satisfaction you'll find on the other side, not madness. This is true for learning a new area of knowledge, this is true for figuring out your own feelings, this is true for deconstructing your prejudices of other people. It's that first moment of coming out of Plato's Cave, when your eyes are still adjusting the light - if you freak out and go back in immediately, of course you'll think that staying outside any longer would've blinded you.
Overall, I think Lovecraft was just the worst case scenario of what happens if you never learn to cope with your anxiety and let it dictate everything you do until you fully believe that everything slightly unfamilliar is the end of the world. I pity him more than anything else, even though I'm probably his worst nightmare.

So I'm more into deconstructing.
My in-world editor is the classic 'saw something too eldritchy and was driven mad by the horror' guy, but his 'madness' (severe dissociative amnesia & depersonalization/derealisation) is created by the subconscious attempt to suppress his memories of the unknowable, and the realisations that feel mindbreaking are actually part of his healing process.
I think the other humanoid in-world writers would be mostly people of the sort Lovecraft would put as Cthulu's quislings rather than its innocent victims or the unlikely heroes trying to foil its plots. Ravenloft's freaks, outcasts and broken people, teaming up against the real abominations. A vistana shaken after prophesizing the God Brain's taking over The Core, desperate for a way to defy fate; A caliban who was okay collaborating with the mindflayers - being shunned her whole life for strangeness, she couldn't really judge people for having tentacles - until she realised how little individuality they have and how they want to to make the entire universe like themselves, and is now fighting to preserve diversity; maybe a cameo from our absolutely-not-gay elf detective... Stuff like that.

The real question is this: We deconstruct these tropes on the humanoid side - but a huge part of the project would be from the aberration side.
So... When we say we do an article from mindflayer perspective, do we mean it in the same way normal gazetteers are from the perspectives of dark wizards like "S", FoS agents or Ciska - as in, 'these people are casually immoral but this shouldn't concern you cause they're our best information source' - or are we going to actually present them as something other than inherently evil monsters, giving them redeeming qualities, allowing them to have feelings?

[Hell_Born]

Since the ArcaneWeirdo asked me for this elsewhere, and I don't think they ever saw my reply, my two cents on the topic...

While I do get where you're coming from, aberration PCs are very hard to make work. For one, there's not much in the way of saner and more relatable species - flumphs, 5e's gnome ceremorphs, and that one race from 3rd edition's Lords of Madness are all I can think of. I'm not saying flumph PCs aren't a bad idea, but what I'd do is look to a different core racial theme.

For one, Bluetspur's gimmick is essentially that it's "the Underdark DoD". The surface is hostile, so life lives in the caves and underworld. We've known this since the first depiction of the domain. We know that the illithids actually keep entire underground farms producing food, and their escaped slaves survive by raiding these farms and stealing what they need - expand the underworld of Bluetspur, give it cavern networks well beyond the direct control of the illithids, and you give those same escaped slaves the territory they need to begin cultivating their own fungal crops and underground lakes, giving them independent food sources.

There's even a reason for the illithids to do this; in Spelljammer, it's noted that while the illithids have bred a "livestock" species called the Oortling, they still much prefer "wild" brains, because the intellectual stimulation of humanoids who are allowed to experience life and a full emotional range results in a tastier meal. Which itself builds on lore from the Illithiad, the first ever illithid sourcebook, that a major component of what the illithids actually take nourishment from is the memories and experiences they consume along with the brain tissue. So illithids might well permit "reserves" to exist because the taste of wild brains is just too maddeningly addictive to not have it, even if it does risk the safety of the colony. This would even tie into the God-Brain's curse; "domestic" brains are essentially empty calories, and only wild-caught brains can give it some sense of relief.

Speaking of Oortlings, you might also be able to do something interesting with them, and/or with brainmoss - this was a 4th edition exclusive bit of lore, where the reason that the illithids were able to form an empire in the first place was because they were able to cultivate this extraplanar fungus as a dietary substitute, reducing humanoid brains from literally their only foodstuff to a luxury consumable good. When their empire fell, they lost the ability to cultivate brainmoss, and that has prevented their numbers from rebuilding, because it's simply not plausible for a large illithid colony to successfully maintain all of the humanoids they need for food.

For another, the illithids of Bluetspur are heavily invested into biomancy. Even if you don't use the God-Brain's backstory as a mad psionicist who came to view the illithids as the key to a higher state of being from the Books of S (which I would, personally, because it's the best interpretation of the God-Brain we've ever gotten), it's canon that the illithids meddle with biology using psionics, surgery, and alchemy; Thoughts of Darkness relies on their psionic broken one ex-slaves, and the Thaani ethnicity in Barovia have always canonically been descendants of escaped human slaves from Bluetspur.

So, personally, if I were going to give bluetspur a native race array to draw PCs from, my theme would be "Pulp Underground Mutants". Creatures that naturally thrive in this pseudo-Underdark and/or which make sense as the creations or by-products of illithid fleshcrafting experiments. Obvious candidates would be calibans and broken ones from other Ravenloft sources, as well as other "degenerate troglodytic demihumans", such as grimlocks, lerara, derro (who even have a backstory of being artificially created human/dwarf hybrid slaves in Greyhawk), or skulks. If you want to get more fantastical than those, some of the playable races from 2e that spring to mind would be...

If you include brainmoss in your altered Bluetspur lore, failed attempts to recultivate brainmoss by infecting human brains with fleshcrafted psycho-reactive fungus could have resulted in the creation of Mold Men (aka Vegepygmies; sapient, humanoid fungus-creatures created when an alien mold consumes a humanoid corpse) and/or Sapromnemes (aka "fungal ghosts"; floating sapient fungi that resemble human brains with eyes and jellyfish tentacles; these gain sentience by growing on a humanoid corpse, absorbing the memories and personality of the body, and suffering quite an identity crisis as a result).

Chitines and Troglodytes could easily make sense as particularly stable strains of broken one, an attempt to create a more "productive" domesticated human by crossing it with a fast-breeding egg-laying animal that didn't go as their creators planned. They do overlap a lot with calibans and broken ones, though, so I'm just mentioning these to be complete. Alternatively, they (and Aspis, a communal species of beetle-people) could represent races that were native to the underworld and which are fighting back against the illithids as malevolent colonizers - this would make them a nice spin on the Spiders of Leng and the Serpentful of the Hyperborean Age, two of the more obscure Mythosian monstrous races. Come to think of it, Nagas in the "snakes with human heads that rely on magic/psionics to compensate for the no-limbs thing" sense would be another interesting byproduct of illithidic fleshcrafting...

Gibberlings actually did have PC stats in 2nd edition, and being based on the H.P. Lovecraft story "The Lurking Fear", would be a fitting addition to the Bluetspur menagerie as examples of how much the illithids can degrade their slave-stock with their fleshcrafting experiments.

The Fraal - an alien race based on the Greys, which were originally part of TSR's Alternity sci-fi RPG, but were converted in an AD&D monster and PC race - could be repurposed as a "gone horribly right" attempt by the illithids to engineer tastier slave-stock, only to instead end up with hyper-intelligent psionic powerhouses that fought their way free and have been fighting the good fight ever since.

And lastly, Flumphs. Nobody knows where flumphs came from. But they hate the illithids, and they are some of the best allies that the various free-folk tribes have, because they eagerly assist them in every way they possibly can. The illithids revile them.

[BackseatGamer]

I like the idea of the PCs not starting as aberrations... but slowly becoming them.

I feel like the implication is that the electrical storms are manifestations of the uncontrolled psychic energy of the dying God-Brain mixed with that of Seldrid, the mad Psion. Therefore, I think it would be interesting if those electrical discharges could leave behind remnants of energy in the atmosphere that slowly mutate the PCs into the only form that can survive this inhospitable environment, which also happens to rip away their agency and sanity just as slowly.

In D&D 3.5, we have the aberrant feats from Lords of Madness, which we can give to the PCs to represent their slide away from humanity. Technically, characters are not restricted to just getting feats from leveling up. DMs can offer them as rewards or vehicles for storytelling. I would also recommend that the players receive psionic abilities over time, which they could conceivably use to their benefit, but also makes it easier for the God-Brain to notice them. If they can get underground, it will protect them from the storm and halt the mutation, but it also means they're closer to the starving monsters that begrudgingly call this hell their home. These mechanics not only create a sense of urgency but also do much of the heavy lifting for us in terms of storytelling.

My question is, what is the goal of the PCs? From my understanding, the general rule of thumb for the domains of dread is that, to leave, you must defeat the Darklord or right their wrongs, after which there is a small window of time where you can escape before the Dark Powers reset the domain and either restore or replace the fallen Darklord.

[TheArcaneWeirdo]

Since the ArcaneWeirdo asked me for this elsewhere, and I don't think they ever saw my reply, my two cents on the topic...

While I do get where you're coming from, aberration PCs are very hard to make work. For one, there's not much in the way of saner and more relatable species - flumphs, 5e's gnome ceremorphs, and that one race from 3rd edition's Lords of Madness are all I can think of. I'm not saying flumph PCs aren't a bad idea, but what I'd do is look to a different core racial theme.

For one, Bluetspur's gimmick is essentially that it's "the Underdark DoD". The surface is hostile, so life lives in the caves and underworld. We've known this since the first depiction of the domain. We know that the illithids actually keep entire underground farms producing food, and their escaped slaves survive by raiding these farms and stealing what they need - expand the underworld of Bluetspur, give it cavern networks well beyond the direct control of the illithids, and you give those same escaped slaves the territory they need to begin cultivating their own fungal crops and underground lakes, giving them independent food sources.

There's even a reason for the illithids to do this; in Spelljammer, it's noted that while the illithids have bred a "livestock" species called the Oortling, they still much prefer "wild" brains, because the intellectual stimulation of humanoids who are allowed to experience life and a full emotional range results in a tastier meal. Which itself builds on lore from the Illithiad, the first ever illithid sourcebook, that a major component of what the illithids actually take nourishment from is the memories and experiences they consume along with the brain tissue. So illithids might well permit "reserves" to exist because the taste of wild brains is just too maddeningly addictive to not have it, even if it does risk the safety of the colony. This would even tie into the God-Brain's curse; "domestic" brains are essentially empty calories, and only wild-caught brains can give it some sense of relief.

Speaking of Oortlings, you might also be able to do something interesting with them, and/or with brainmoss - this was a 4th edition exclusive bit of lore, where the reason that the illithids were able to form an empire in the first place was because they were able to cultivate this extraplanar fungus as a dietary substitute, reducing humanoid brains from literally their only foodstuff to a luxury consumable good. When their empire fell, they lost the ability to cultivate brainmoss, and that has prevented their numbers from rebuilding, because it's simply not plausible for a large illithid colony to successfully maintain all of the humanoids they need for food.

For another, the illithids of Bluetspur are heavily invested into biomancy. Even if you don't use the God-Brain's backstory as a mad psionicist who came to view the illithids as the key to a higher state of being from the Books of S (which I would, personally, because it's the best interpretation of the God-Brain we've ever gotten), it's canon that the illithids meddle with biology using psionics, surgery, and alchemy; Thoughts of Darkness relies on their psionic broken one ex-slaves, and the Thaani ethnicity in Barovia have always canonically been descendants of escaped human slaves from Bluetspur.

So, personally, if I were going to give bluetspur a native race array to draw PCs from, my theme would be "Pulp Underground Mutants". Creatures that naturally thrive in this pseudo-Underdark and/or which make sense as the creations or by-products of illithid fleshcrafting experiments. Obvious candidates would be calibans and broken ones from other Ravenloft sources, as well as other "degenerate troglodytic demihumans", such as grimlocks, lerara, derro (who even have a backstory of being artificially created human/dwarf hybrid slaves in Greyhawk), or skulks. If you want to get more fantastical than those, some of the playable races from 2e that spring to mind would be...

If you include brainmoss in your altered Bluetspur lore, failed attempts to recultivate brainmoss by infecting human brains with fleshcrafted psycho-reactive fungus could have resulted in the creation of Mold Men (aka Vegepygmies; sapient, humanoid fungus-creatures created when an alien mold consumes a humanoid corpse) and/or Sapromnemes (aka "fungal ghosts"; floating sapient fungi that resemble human brains with eyes and jellyfish tentacles; these gain sentience by growing on a humanoid corpse, absorbing the memories and personality of the body, and suffering quite an identity crisis as a result).

Chitines and Troglodytes could easily make sense as particularly stable strains of broken one, an attempt to create a more "productive" domesticated human by crossing it with a fast-breeding egg-laying animal that didn't go as their creators planned. They do overlap a lot with calibans and broken ones, though, so I'm just mentioning these to be complete. Alternatively, they (and Aspis, a communal species of beetle-people) could represent races that were native to the underworld and which are fighting back against the illithids as malevolent colonizers - this would make them a nice spin on the Spiders of Leng and the Serpentful of the Hyperborean Age, two of the more obscure Mythosian monstrous races. Come to think of it, Nagas in the "snakes with human heads that rely on magic/psionics to compensate for the no-limbs thing" sense would be another interesting byproduct of illithidic fleshcrafting...

Gibberlings actually did have PC stats in 2nd edition, and being based on the H.P. Lovecraft story "The Lurking Fear", would be a fitting addition to the Bluetspur menagerie as examples of how much the illithids can degrade their slave-stock with their fleshcrafting experiments.

The Fraal - an alien race based on the Greys, which were originally part of TSR's Alternity sci-fi RPG, but were converted in an AD&D monster and PC race - could be repurposed as a "gone horribly right" attempt by the illithids to engineer tastier slave-stock, only to instead end up with hyper-intelligent psionic powerhouses that fought their way free and have been fighting the good fight ever since.

And lastly, Flumphs. Nobody knows where flumphs came from. But they hate the illithids, and they are some of the best allies that the various free-folk tribes have, because they eagerly assist them in every way they possibly can. The illithids revile them.

I've read your response, I just didn't answer yet.

I think the project will cover enough other topics for 3-5 species to be enough. We can do Flumph, Gnome Ceremorph, Psionic Caliban & Oortling and maybe come up with some others on the way.