D&D 5E Illithid PC

[Ancalagon]

Hmmm...

I was expecting something grossly over-powered but it isn't at all. Instead you need an explanation as to why they aren't much more powerful than the average human/dwarf/efc. One way to look at it is this: Illithids are powerful, in part, because they are connected to the Master Brain. Your character has lost this connection, giving it independence, but greatly reducing its powers.

The other challenge, as noted above, is how *hated* the ilithids are by, well, *everyone*.

 

[Hawk Diesel]

I can't take credit for this, but a friend of mine that I game with put this together for a friend playing a Mind Flayer in our current game:

Illithid

Alien, frightening beings of great mental prowess and forceful personalities.

Ability Score Increase. Your Intelligence score increases by 2, and your Constitution increases by 1.

Age. Illithids fully complete ceremorphosis by the age of 9, and have become fully mature and complete in their education by age 15. Illithids live longer than humans, but they do eventually die naturally after hundreds of years.

Alignment. Illithids normally have a natural tendency towards hierarchy, discipline, and cruelty, and have an alignment of lawful evil. Some individuals find themselves developing more-individualistic personalities than their fellows early after ceremorphosis and have an alignment of neutral evil. A minority lack the characteristic sadism of their brethren while retaining their preoccupation with organization, and have an alignment of lawful neutral.

Any illithid of any other alignment, usually the product of unusual circumstances such as mutation, magical alteration, extensive contact with unshackled non-illithid minds while cut off from the networked communal intelligence of their colonies, or intervention by otherworldly forces, is likely regarded by others of its kind as either a disgusting social deviant and pariah, or, at worst, as pollution to be cleansed. Many such illithid are either mentally wiped blank and re-educated or simply thrown out of their home communities if their natures are too open and offensive to their fellows' sensibilities.

Size. Most illithids are at least as tall as tall humans, standing at least a few inches shy of six feet, but their bodies very slender and emaciated, weighing much less than an average being of their stature. Your size is Medium.

Speed. Your base walking speed is 30 feet.

Darkvision. You have darkvision up to a range of 60 ft.

Magic Resistance. You have advantage on saving throws against psionic and magical spells or effects.

Mind Blast. You may use your action to attack anything in front of you with a mind blast. When you use your mind blast, each creature in a 15 ft. cone must make an Intelligence saving throw equal to 8 + your Intelligence modifier + your proficiency bonus. A creature takes 2d6 Psychic damage on a failed save, and half as much damage on a successful save. This damage increases to 3d6 at 6th level, 4d6 at 11th level, and 5d6 at 16th level. After you use your mind blast, you can't use it again until you complete a short or long rest.

Devour Brain. As you consume the brain of another creature, you briefly interface with its mind. You may use your action to attempt to wrap your tentacles around the head of an unconscious living creature or a living creature that died in the last few minutes, then use your alien jaw to open its skull and eat its brain matter. After doing so, you learn at least one piece of useful information the creature knew, and while you maintain Concentration, as though concentrating on a spell, you gain temporary proficiency with a weapon, skill, or set of tools the creature had proficiency with. If it was not dead, using this ability (obviously) kills the creature.

Aberrant Mind. Even those illithids who have undergone alignment shifts via magical means or mutations struggle to understand the thoughts of less-alien beings. You suffer disadvantage on all Wisdom (Insight) checks, even if you are proficient in them, and on any Charisma ability score tests in which you are not proficient.

Languages. You can "speak," read, and write, Common and Undercommon, and can write Illithid, a language so unintuitive to most humanoid minds that only fellow illithids can decipher it without the use of magic by feeling it with their tentacles.

Alternatively, if you play a Dragonborn but reskin it as a Mind Flayer. Just change the resistance to psychic, and the breath weapon to cone and deal psychic damage.

If you also went sorcerer, you could go Dragon Bloodline and take the following spells, changing their damage type to Psychic for flavor reasons:

Sorcerer
Level - Spells
1st - Burning Hands,* Detect Magic
3rd - Agnazaar’s Scorcher,* Enthrall
5th - Fear, Fireball*
7th - Elemental Bane**, Wall of Fire*
9th - Cone of cold*, Dominate Person

* Damage type changes to psychic
** Damage type affected by spell is always psychic

Sorcerers in my games gain access to a kind of Domain Spell list as bonus spells, which is where I came up with these.

 

[Lanefan]

[MENTION=6875235]Elon Tusk[/MENTION]

First off, I'll just say I'm not in the least bit sold on Mind Flayers as PCs. That said...

You're going to have some hard work to do if you ever want to use Mind Flayers as enemies in your game, in order to explain why every one of them is by default so much more powerful than every one of the PC Flayers were when they first started out.

I mean, just being a Mind Flayer at all should give you massive psionics (sorry, 30' telepathy is not massive psionics) - you know, the kinds of things that let you destroy a mind from across the room, or stun people, or dominate their will to turn them into your puppets, etc., etc.; never mind that you can eat brains and should be able to do so long before the foe gets to 0 h.p. (having your brain eaten tends to kill you). Your PC Flayers are by necessity nerfed, I'm just saying to keep in mind that for this to make sense you by extension have to nerf much of the Mind Flayer race and thus remove a very challenging potential set of enemies from your game. If you're cool with that, then carry on.

Also, you have a typo in your write-up's first page under Alhoon: "Necromancy" is spelled wrong.

Lan-"if anything I want to make Flayers more dangerous, not less"-efan

 

[cbwjm]

If you want to expand the illithid powers, you could also design a 5+ level illithid 'class' as a way for them to learn and develop their natural powers. I did something similar for my genasi remakes which allows them to expand upon their natural elemental powers.

 

[Hawk Diesel]

[MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] I gotta disagree with you on some of your points.

First of all, entries in the monster manual or other such books are only the most common representatives of their race, and may be only the most commonly experienced by adventurers. There may be a huge amount of variation within a monstrous race. Especially ones that would become adventurers themselves could be younger, less experienced, or otherwise odd examples of their species that may have been outcast or not fit in.

Then, to support [MENTION=6875235]Elon Tusk[/MENTION]'s decision to create an Illithid race, there are TONS of examples in sci-fi and fantasy of members on an alien/warring race helping the human side. Star Gate (Teal'c), ExoSquad (Marsala), Halo (The Arbiter), Transformers: Beast Wars (Dinobot), V (Willie), Star Trek Voyager (Borg Designate 7 of 9), First Wave (Joshua), Farscape (Every member aboard Moya), Terminator 2 (The T-800)... and that's just off the top of my head. It's a huge trope in fiction where a members of an alien/distrusted race/warring faction join up with the "good guys" and work to earn trust. In fact, that tension can be a big driver of various plot devices to move the story forward. I mean, if Star Trek can make a member of the Borg a main part of the cast, I don't see why one couldn't do the same for an Illithid in D&D.

 

[Satyrn]

I mean, if Star Trek can make a member of the Borg a main part of the cast, I don't see why one couldn't do the same for an Illithid in D&D.

Just put a chainmail bikini on the mind flayer, and boom! You're good to go.

 

[Elon Tusk]

Mind Flayers are created when a tadpole enters the brain of a humanoid, consuming its essence. What if the personality of PC Mind Flayers survives the process? ... That removes the inherently evil aspect and allows some less alien mindset. And can also work as a justification for the different abilities.

One thing to keep in mind, NPC races, especially high level ones, most still come from babies, and those babies don't start with all the abilities of those we see in the published sources.

Illithids are powerful, in part, because they are connected to the Master Brain. Your character has lost this connection, giving it independence, but greatly reducing its powers.

You're going to have some hard work to do if you ever want to use Mind Flayers as enemies in your game, in order to explain why every one of them is by default so much more powerful than every one of the PC Flayers were when they first started out.

I'm just saying to keep in mind that for this to make sense you by extension have to nerf much of the Mind Flayer race and thus remove a very challenging potential set of enemies from your game.

If you want to expand the illithid powers, you could also design a 5+ level illithid 'class' as a way for them to learn and develop their natural powers.

First of all, entries in the monster manual or other such books are only the most common representatives of their race, and may be only the most commonly experienced by adventurers. There may be a huge amount of variation within a monstrous race. Especially ones that would become adventurers themselves could be younger, less experienced, or otherwise odd examples of their species that may have been outcast or not fit in.

One thread I see coming from most of these responses is that a PC Illithid should be different than an NPC from the MM.

I've tried converting monsters into classes by taking initial levels in just the monster, but I didn't like the way it turned out, mostly because of how far it put the character behind the rest of the party in his class.
Making the PC Illithid a juvenile is a definite possibility, but to me at least complicates things more by restricting the Mind Flayer NPC.

So if the Illithid PC goes with Jester David's idea of part of the host brain survives the tadpole ceremorphosis, then it becomes something different. Because of this difference, it flees from other illithids and removes itself from the hive-mind of the elder brain.
Using 5e language, it might be a called a half-illithid. I kind of like Illithoid better, both as a word and since it is not made of half of two species.
This way monster Mind Flayers retain their potency, and there is reason why Illithoids aren't as powerful.

And again, I want to thank each of you for your time and ideas.

 

[Lanefan]

[MENTION=29398]Lanefan[/MENTION] I gotta disagree with you on some of your points.

First of all, entries in the monster manual or other such books are only the most common representatives of their race, and may be only the most commonly experienced by adventurers. There may be a huge amount of variation within a monstrous race. Especially ones that would become adventurers themselves could be younger, less experienced, or otherwise odd examples of their species that may have been outcast or not fit in.

Fair enough; to each their own.

Then, to support [MENTION=6875235]Elon Tusk[/MENTION]'s decision to create an Illithid race, there are TONS of examples in sci-fi and fantasy of members on an alien/warring race helping the human side. Star Gate (Teal'c), ExoSquad (Marsala), Halo (The Arbiter), Transformers: Beast Wars (Dinobot), V (Willie), Star Trek Voyager (Borg Designate 7 of 9), First Wave (Joshua), Farscape (Every member aboard Moya), Terminator 2 (The T-800)... and that's just off the top of my head. It's a huge trope in fiction where a members of an alien/distrusted race/warring faction join up with the "good guys" and work to earn trust. In fact, that tension can be a big driver of various plot devices to move the story forward. I mean, if Star Trek can make a member of the Borg a main part of the cast, I don't see why one couldn't do the same for an Illithid in D&D.

Other than the Farscape example (which I'll take your word for, not ever having watched it) those are all specific individuals with specific stories attached; and one could I suppose do the same sort of thing in a D&D party. However, the proposal here is to make a playable race out of Flayers rather than have just one, which means in theory there could easily end up being several in the party and-or campaign. Tough to justify...

Lanefan

 

[Hawk Diesel]

However, the proposal here is to make a playable race out of Flayers rather than have just one, which means in theory there could easily end up being several in the party and-or campaign. Tough to justify...

Lanefan

Well, yes by making the option available that does in theory mean it is available to other players. But it sounds like this was made by a player request, so it isn't likely to be a problem with everyone wanting to be an illithid. I mean, one of the cool things people can do in D&D (I've done this a couple of times) is to skin a regular race as a monstrous race. A Goliath could easily be skinned as a minotaur, and a Tiefling could be a legit demon/devil rather than a evil-tainted humanoid. Besides, if monstrous races weren't supposed to be supported, than why release goblinoids, lizardfolk, ect in Volo's Guide?

Obviously this is definitely a playstyle preference, but there's always a way to do it. As long as everyone is having fun and the party is relatively balanced against each other (ie no single player significantly more or less powerful than the others), I tend to say go for it.

Btw, I HIGHLY recommend Farscape if you haven't seen it. It's a mature Aussie version of the old Space Cases show.

 

[Ath-kethin]

One thread I see coming from most of these responses is that a PC Illithid should be different than an NPC from the MM.

I've tried converting monsters into classes by taking initial levels in just the monster, but I didn't like the way it turned out, mostly because of how far it put the character behind the rest of the party in his class.
Making the PC Illithid a juvenile is a definite possibility, but to me at least complicates things more by restricting the Mind Flayer NPC.

So if the Illithid PC goes with Jester David's idea of part of the host brain survives the tadpole ceremorphosis, then it becomes something different. Because of this difference, it flees from other illithids and removes itself from the hive-mind of the elder brain.
Using 5e language, it might be a called a half-illithid. I kind of like Illithoid better, both as a word and since it is not made of half of two species.
This way monster Mind Flayers retain their potency, and there is reason why Illithoids aren't as powerful.

And again, I want to thank each of you for your time and ideas.

According to classic D&D lore, there is no "surviving" becoming an illithid; if the tadpole fulfills its biological purpose, it takes over the host's form completely and irrevocably. A "half-illithid" comes about when a tadpole is inserted into the brain of a non-human. They are not as powerful as true illithids, but are much stronger than normal specimens of their race. My point in all that is that a "half-illithid" isn't going to be something that could work in this instance, at least by RAW canon.

It IS possible for an illithid to sever ties with and flee its community and Elder Brain, though this is normally done in the pursuit of magical knowledge and eventual lichdom. So that could work as a background if it fits what your player wants to do.

Realistically, I think your race writeup will work fine. The biggest hurdle the PC will have to overcome, as others have noted, will be the fact that they will terrify almost everyone they meet, who will likely resort to violence immediately. It's not wise to take chances with mind flayers. That said, there is precedent for illithgids to trade with and have strong connections with other races, from fellow Underdark denizens to basically everyone in the Astromundi Cluster. I guess if you want to play it that way, there's no reason ind flayers couldn't be an accepted (if distasteful) trading partner to a kingdom. As their reproductive cycle is a closely guarded secret, even that might not deter greedy merchants from dealing with the illithids. And that's assuming the creatures are well-known enough to even be feared and distrusted beyond their obviously alien appearance.