Inspired by Lords of Madness (Updated with 65% more ideas, and 74% more confusion)!

[Jeremy Ackerman-Yost]

The recursive illithids would work with my spiralling permissive timeline, but not with Mouse's deterministic mobius-strip timeline. If you want to do recursive illithids, you need to come up with a reason why the first group of illithids went back (since they didn't have illithids attacking them).

Technically, it could work with either. With your spiralling permissive timeline, you need another threat initially, and the I^2s either fail to find and remove said threat (so they create I^3 to do so), or they replace it and become the threat themselves.

With the mobius strip, all the Illithids of different strains have "always been there" and they don't know they're working against each other, or that they're on a mobius strip. They're on a strip, but they THINK it's a permissive timeline, hence all the "going back."

I like that one for the irony, but I prefer a permissive timeline, actually. What's the point of time travel if you can't change anything?

 

[BryonD]

Since I haven't seen yet Codex Ana...^R Lords of Madness, it's info I got from the Illithiad.

Yeah, and that's what I was asking about, see..., because I, OF COURSE, knew all about the stuff in Lords of Madness. Duh! I was just looking for OTHER references......

 

[Ry]

Thread necromancy! I thought this one was lost in the crash, but it WASN'T.

I had one more idea for it too, that I'm going to use in my new campaign: Ever since being thrown backwards in time the elder brains have been increasingly suffering decay and paranoia. While most illithids are either too deferential or too quickly found out to address the problem, a handful of illithids are seeking information on the aboleths to discover what they can about how to repair the problem.

Of those, one has discovered the beginnings of a ritual that other illithids would call blasphemous: The devouring of an elder brain by a properly stimulated Ulitharid will result in the creation of an independent, aboleth-like creature with the inherited memories and psionic capabilities of the elder brain.

 

[Ry]

Ooh, and Dagon gifted the kuo-toa to mortal oceans for the use of the aboleths, whose collective will he intends to consume at the end of time.

 

[FunkBGR]

Thank god for some necromancy there!

I'm currently running The Night Below, and this thread has some amazing ideas for stuff to do with it. Especially because I'm throwing in the Dawn of the Overmind adventure bit.

The only thing I don't like about it so far is that it seems like a lot of favoritism toward Illithid, and not Aboleth. I personally like the bigger guys a bit more, but consider some of the ideas here *yoinked*

 

[Ry]

Hey, you know what they say. If the illithids win now, the aboleths win later.

 

[amethal]

Thank god for some necromancy there!

Yeah, normally the stuff that gets reanimated is pretty yucky, but this is sheer class.

Whatever happened to that Mouseferatu guy? He had some great ideas about Mind Flayers, but since they are WotC intellectual property he'd only be able to play with them if he got offered WotC freelance work ....

In my homebrew campaign, aboleths are the elder evil that are magically imprisoned beneath the surface of the world. They eventually get out (of course) when magic itself fails. I can see them becoming a threat to the Mindflayer Empire in the far future, hence the mind flayers fleeing into the past.

And its a delicious irony that the mind flayers are the descendants of those aboleth who dared to transform themselves into tiny tadpoles in order to escape imprisonment (and subsequently infected humanoids in order to gain power).

 

[Mouseferatu]

Whatever happened to that Mouseferatu guy? He had some great ideas about Mind Flayers, but since they are WotC intellectual property he'd only be able to play with them if he got offered WotC freelance work ....

Actually, the sad thing is, in all the stuff I've done for WotC to date, I still haven't had the opportunity to do much with mind flayers (or aboleths, for that matter).

 

[Ry]

Actually, the sad thing is, in all the stuff I've done for WotC to date, I still haven't had the opportunity to do much with mind flayers (or aboleths, for that matter).

Cityscape II: There goes the neighborhood

 

[Set]

Neat idea. I particularly like the idea of the Elder Brains and the Aboleth being connected in some way. Given the differences between them, it would almost seem like some Elder Brains 'fled' the future Illithid Imperium to seed themselves at the dawn of time.

In the 'present day,' the Illithids themselves have been created as an intermediary form, allowing the originally non-humanoid (and primarily sessile) species to interact with humanoid life more readily. The Aboleth was a different route towards the same utility, able to move under their own power, unlike the Elder Brains, but they had to give up a certain amount of their psionic specialization to achieve these purely physical adaptations, that they knew that they would need back at the dawn of time.

The Aboleth and the Illithids may or may not recognize each other as two different possibilities, and may even consider each other hated rivals, each attempting to exterminate the other and make their own offshoot the dominant and solitary 'true' future. Or, only one of them might know 'the truth,' and regard the other as an unwitting 'intermediary phase.'

In the case of the Illithids, they might regard the Aboleth as a tool whose time is long past, and no longer of any consequence, treating with them with barely concealed contempt, thinking them barbaric anachronisms, adapted to a primordial world that no longer exists.

In the case of the Aboleth, they might be waiting patiently, convinced that they have already achieved the pinnacle of evolution, and that the humanoid 'Mind Flayers' are nothing more than a temporary convenience, to be 'phased out' with all other humanoid life, in the course of ages. To the Aboleth, the Illithids are nothing more than eggshells, to be inevitably broken when they birth the new age.