Piratecat said:
2. This argument took place on a former illithid world. What might it look like in the present, thousands of years later?
Ok, I don't have the OLD issue number of the Dragon magazine that first made my evil DM's heart fall in love with the evil that was illithids, but the article was something along the lines of The Sunless World.
If this was a "Capital" of the ancient illithid empire, you want something that would allow both the illithid and their slaves to function passibly well in terms of terrain, climate, and light, while not causing discomfort to the illithid masters.
Thus, a world with a massive but dim red sun. Everything is constantly tinted red. Bright enough for most humanoids to function in, but much gentler to illithid eyes. A generally damp world, many marshes, perhaps lowland seas, and disturbingly sharp mountains, some blasted from the war, others generally intact, and carved with disturbinging serpentine and tooth-like projections.
What plants survive would likely appear black, or perhaps have a violet hue, needing different chemicals to absorb the red light.
There would be very little difference between night and noon in the habitable space of the world - similar to a confused arctic spring - it's almost always "daylight" except for perhaps 2 to 4 hours or darkness, but the sun never rises more than dusk levels of illumination above the horizon.
There would likely be horribly shattered plains of shattered scree and rubble where the mind magics of the two sides blasted away the vegetation and opposing troops, probably leaving crater like walls in the major areas of battle that have kept much of the swamps beyond away...except for a muddly red-brown sludge in the dim light suggestive of pulped bodies, though really just wet dirt.
Likely there would be nasty diseases and parasites in the water, and possibly in the air, left over from the rot of millions of pounds of illithid flesh craft war machines. That and scattered in places, occasional inhuman bones and skulls, and odd metal bits of illithid ancient weapons.
And at the base of a massive set of sharp-peaked concentric mountains obviously pried forth from the earth, a flattened, slag-like plain of fused and once melted plain a mile across, the from of the outer most mountains shattered and collapsed in a round pile of rubble. The remnants of a "guard tower" spike obviously lifted up after the battle as a podium of sorts. With it's tip cracked and an unremovable black stain - where the Pronouncement of Two Skies was made.
That's probably the basics of how I'd describe it.