Psion
Adventurer
It may seem a little odd that I, at this time, turn my attention to a book that saw print so long ago. In truth, this review has been a long time in the making, as I seldom have time to review products they days I purchase myself. But I added a sentence here and a paragraph there, and voilà! Here it is!
Those in the know about licensing issues will realize that, since this is a third party book about a closed source product, it was published well before the revised edition of the rules, before the SRD was formalized. The recent publication of Lords of Madness may be a good chance to examine mind flayer material and the book, as will be discussed, ages surprisingly well under the 3.5 rules.
Unveiled Masters: The Essential Guide to Mind Flayers is a sourcebook providing new rules and background materials for mind flayers. As stated above, the book was being produced at the time when the only System Reference Document available was an unofficial version. As such Unveiled Masters is one of a few products that was allowed to go to print with items in it that were not included in the final SRD - in this case, the mind flayer.
Unveiled Masters is written by Steve Kenson (author of Mutants and Masterminds and a variety of other influential d20 works), James Malizewski (author of various d20 products such as Green Ronin’s Mindshadows and Arcana: Societies of Magic), and M. Jason Parent (ENWorld’s "Hellhound" and part owner of EN Publishing.) The book is published by Paradigm Concepts, publisher of the Arcanis setting.
As the book is written for the 3.0 edition of the rules, I will dedicate some of my analysis to adaptation to the current version.
A First Look
Unveiled Masters is a 112 page perfect-bound softcover book with an MSRP of $19.99.
The front cover art is by famed D&D artist Todd Lockwood, and depicts a pair of long-tentacled mind flayers with a female human captive in a cavern. The piece matches a companion piece that appeared on Green Ronin’s Plot & Poison. Such covers were an interesting byproduct of Green Ronin and Paradigm’s short live OGL Interlink strategy, in which the publishers put out books that were loosely paired.
The interior is black-and-white. Interior artwork is by Toren “Macbin” Atkinson, Andrew Baker, J.P. Targete, Glen Osterberger, Paul Carrick, Alex Bradley, Thomas Manning, Richard Page, and Paul (Prof) Herbert. Atkinson’s eerie style is well in tune with the topic of the book, but looking back at some of these pieces, it seems to me that he is a stronger artist now. Targete’s style is also well used in this book, and it is unfortunate that I have not seen much of his work in more recent d20 products. Most of the remaining artists, I am not as familiar with, but I did like the nicely shaded and detailed work by page as well as some of the interesting action-laden illustrations by Herbert.
The layout is generally pleasant and readable, save for one recurring problem that cropped up in many early Paradigm books: many of the chapter breaks occur in the middle of pages, even in the middle of columns. I can see that this practice might allow them to fit more text into the page count, but the body text font size is large enough that I feel that if any page-fitting was to be done, they well could have afforded to do it by playing with fonts.
A Deeper Look
Unveiled Masters is divided into 11 chapters. The first third or so of the book (and the first three chapters) primarily consist of rules-light background text, and then the chapters become more rules laden as the chapters progress.
Despite the fact that Paradigm was allowed to go forward with their publication of the book after the SRD was formalized without the mind flayer, they still could not use a number of closed terms under the licenses it was printed under. The book’s solution to this in many cases was to use “near miss” titles like “illeth” and “gidh.”
Similarly, the book’s background and history chapters play up the resemblance of mind flayers to Lovecraftian entities like Cthulhu and starspawn with terms like “Ftaghn”.
The former I found a bit annoying, but probably functional; after all, readers need to be able to “connect the dots” to established lore about the creatures, and the authors probably would not have done well to vastly diverge from existing material on the creatures. The latter, however, I just find annoying. I really see no problem with drawing from the works of the famed horror author for inspiration when it comes to fleshing out background details; this is not the first nor will it be the last example of inspiration and cross germination in fantasy and horror fiction. But unlike the names of game entities, there is no real reason to make similar and placeable names, and it just proves annoying.
The background, sociology, and ecology sections do bear some resemblance to previously existing material on the mind flayers (the most influential of which is obviously Cordell’s Illithiad, much of which has “trickled down” to subsequent game products, more recently Lords of Madness), without straying too close. In most cases, the distinctions are on the level of flavor details in which you can safely choose whichever variant you prefer without affecting the big picture. For example, in the Illithiad and Lords of Madness, mind flayers are said to reproduce by placing a tadpole, or immature illithid, in a humanoid victim’s skull. In Unveiled Master, an egg is placed into the victim’s skull instead.
One point of contrast with Lords of Madness conjectural origins of the mind flayers is that Unveiled Masters have mind flayers originating from before the beginning of time instead of the end. Their creator and Cthulhu stand-in “Ftaghn” existed in a previous universe, and managed to survive to this one, where he created a perfect race, or so mind flayer creation myth says. This origin jives more with my personal perception of them, though the future-born mind flayer has interesting possibilities.
The fifth chapter, Illethkin covers the topic of races. This is roughly divided into two subsections: variants and relatives of mind flayers and mind flayer slaves.
The variants are interesting, including both half-illithid creatures and racial variants like protoneth (shape shifting illethkin, which I used with devious efficiency in my Second World campaign.) Some sample statistics blocks are given, and an illethkin template is provided. This template is a variant of the psionic template of the 3.0 Psionics Handbook. As this template is a bit out date (being that psionic combat has changed and that the template was sort of bent in the first place), you may want to try using the phrenic template in its place (or better yet, the psionic template from Book of Templates Deluxe Edition 3.5.)
The sixth chapter is possibly the most intriguing in the book, detailing Illeth technology. The centerpiece of their technology is flesh crafting, the creation of living tools. Such technology is thematically perfect for mind flayers, and the text evokes images of mind flayer cities with huge lifelike veins and arteries bringing food and water and carrying away waste. Of course, no such book would be complete without implementations of the technology that allow you to mangle PCs, and DMs will find wonderful toys to equip their tentacled villains with such as the wonderfully illustrated scorpion harness (living armor with a living weapon built right in.) This is great material, and should mix well with the flesh grafing item rules in official books such as Lords of Madness and Fiend Folio.
The chapter also includes a few psionic items.
The seventh chapter Forbidden Magic provides new spells, psionic powers, and clerical domains (darkness, domination, fear, and madness). The domains and spells are mostly usable in 3.5, though some spell changes might affect the domains (e.g., the madness spell includes eyebite, which was so wrongfully torn asunder under the 3.5 revision.) The spells are appropriately devious; imagine if the mind flayer gained intelligence when it sucked your brains out (though this particular spell, brain drain, seems a little iffy depending on how you read the rules. As I read it, you could never gain an enhancement bonus of more than +4, though it would be easy to assume that successive hits stack, which would be abusive.)
The psionic powers are mostly usable as well, but of course will lack the scaling text than many Expanded Psionics Handbook powers use.
Chapter 8 and 9 introduce new character options. It is here that the book really earns its keep in the face of Lords of Madness, which was a little short on items specifically for mind flayers. (Indeed, most of the new options in LoM seemed targeted at PC races fighting them.) A variety of prestige classes are introduced specifically for mind flayers: Aggrithid (A flayer with a thing against drow; Among other things, they gain the ranger’s favored enemy ability... curiously phrased in a way that the 3.5 change in rules need not be adjusted for), skull collector, mind eater, keeper (of lore), warrior of the violet line (sort of an flayer anti-paladin), dark slayer, and master of the flesh (a personal favorite, a master of fleshcrafting.)
One nice thing is that many of these give bonus manifester levels. At the time, that wasn’t the greatest choice since mind flayers still had spell like abilities and they had to be very high level to take advantage of some of them. That said, this convention works right into the 3.5 Expanded Psionics Handbook mechanic for mind flayers, which model their psionic abilities as psion levels.
The last two chapters take up a scant few pages, and discuss some variant background ideas and different takes on the role of mind flayers in a game.
Conclusions
I was left a little cold about how close the homage to Lovecraft’s work was in places. It’s like they didn’t so much rub the serial numbers off as scratch them a little (coincidentally, that would be a turn of the phrase I stole from one of the authors of this book...) Still, if you can overlook this, some of the background when it comes to where they came for before our world is deeper than you are provided in Lords of Madness. And though the authors obviously could not follow the official material from Illithiad and Lords of Madness precisely, they follow it closely enough that you can stick with the official take where you want but still use lots of this book.
The biggest benefits of this book if you are running a game that features mind flayers prominently as villains are the ideas and rules presented in the technology and character options chapters. Those provide some rich fodder to help make mind flayers the diverse and horrifying villains they deserve to be.
Overall grade: B+
-Alan D. Kohler
Those in the know about licensing issues will realize that, since this is a third party book about a closed source product, it was published well before the revised edition of the rules, before the SRD was formalized. The recent publication of Lords of Madness may be a good chance to examine mind flayer material and the book, as will be discussed, ages surprisingly well under the 3.5 rules.
Unveiled Masters: The Essential Guide to Mind Flayers is a sourcebook providing new rules and background materials for mind flayers. As stated above, the book was being produced at the time when the only System Reference Document available was an unofficial version. As such Unveiled Masters is one of a few products that was allowed to go to print with items in it that were not included in the final SRD - in this case, the mind flayer.
Unveiled Masters is written by Steve Kenson (author of Mutants and Masterminds and a variety of other influential d20 works), James Malizewski (author of various d20 products such as Green Ronin’s Mindshadows and Arcana: Societies of Magic), and M. Jason Parent (ENWorld’s "Hellhound" and part owner of EN Publishing.) The book is published by Paradigm Concepts, publisher of the Arcanis setting.
As the book is written for the 3.0 edition of the rules, I will dedicate some of my analysis to adaptation to the current version.
A First Look
Unveiled Masters is a 112 page perfect-bound softcover book with an MSRP of $19.99.
The front cover art is by famed D&D artist Todd Lockwood, and depicts a pair of long-tentacled mind flayers with a female human captive in a cavern. The piece matches a companion piece that appeared on Green Ronin’s Plot & Poison. Such covers were an interesting byproduct of Green Ronin and Paradigm’s short live OGL Interlink strategy, in which the publishers put out books that were loosely paired.
The interior is black-and-white. Interior artwork is by Toren “Macbin” Atkinson, Andrew Baker, J.P. Targete, Glen Osterberger, Paul Carrick, Alex Bradley, Thomas Manning, Richard Page, and Paul (Prof) Herbert. Atkinson’s eerie style is well in tune with the topic of the book, but looking back at some of these pieces, it seems to me that he is a stronger artist now. Targete’s style is also well used in this book, and it is unfortunate that I have not seen much of his work in more recent d20 products. Most of the remaining artists, I am not as familiar with, but I did like the nicely shaded and detailed work by page as well as some of the interesting action-laden illustrations by Herbert.
The layout is generally pleasant and readable, save for one recurring problem that cropped up in many early Paradigm books: many of the chapter breaks occur in the middle of pages, even in the middle of columns. I can see that this practice might allow them to fit more text into the page count, but the body text font size is large enough that I feel that if any page-fitting was to be done, they well could have afforded to do it by playing with fonts.
A Deeper Look
Unveiled Masters is divided into 11 chapters. The first third or so of the book (and the first three chapters) primarily consist of rules-light background text, and then the chapters become more rules laden as the chapters progress.
Despite the fact that Paradigm was allowed to go forward with their publication of the book after the SRD was formalized without the mind flayer, they still could not use a number of closed terms under the licenses it was printed under. The book’s solution to this in many cases was to use “near miss” titles like “illeth” and “gidh.”
Similarly, the book’s background and history chapters play up the resemblance of mind flayers to Lovecraftian entities like Cthulhu and starspawn with terms like “Ftaghn”.
The former I found a bit annoying, but probably functional; after all, readers need to be able to “connect the dots” to established lore about the creatures, and the authors probably would not have done well to vastly diverge from existing material on the creatures. The latter, however, I just find annoying. I really see no problem with drawing from the works of the famed horror author for inspiration when it comes to fleshing out background details; this is not the first nor will it be the last example of inspiration and cross germination in fantasy and horror fiction. But unlike the names of game entities, there is no real reason to make similar and placeable names, and it just proves annoying.
The background, sociology, and ecology sections do bear some resemblance to previously existing material on the mind flayers (the most influential of which is obviously Cordell’s Illithiad, much of which has “trickled down” to subsequent game products, more recently Lords of Madness), without straying too close. In most cases, the distinctions are on the level of flavor details in which you can safely choose whichever variant you prefer without affecting the big picture. For example, in the Illithiad and Lords of Madness, mind flayers are said to reproduce by placing a tadpole, or immature illithid, in a humanoid victim’s skull. In Unveiled Master, an egg is placed into the victim’s skull instead.
One point of contrast with Lords of Madness conjectural origins of the mind flayers is that Unveiled Masters have mind flayers originating from before the beginning of time instead of the end. Their creator and Cthulhu stand-in “Ftaghn” existed in a previous universe, and managed to survive to this one, where he created a perfect race, or so mind flayer creation myth says. This origin jives more with my personal perception of them, though the future-born mind flayer has interesting possibilities.
The fifth chapter, Illethkin covers the topic of races. This is roughly divided into two subsections: variants and relatives of mind flayers and mind flayer slaves.
The variants are interesting, including both half-illithid creatures and racial variants like protoneth (shape shifting illethkin, which I used with devious efficiency in my Second World campaign.) Some sample statistics blocks are given, and an illethkin template is provided. This template is a variant of the psionic template of the 3.0 Psionics Handbook. As this template is a bit out date (being that psionic combat has changed and that the template was sort of bent in the first place), you may want to try using the phrenic template in its place (or better yet, the psionic template from Book of Templates Deluxe Edition 3.5.)
The sixth chapter is possibly the most intriguing in the book, detailing Illeth technology. The centerpiece of their technology is flesh crafting, the creation of living tools. Such technology is thematically perfect for mind flayers, and the text evokes images of mind flayer cities with huge lifelike veins and arteries bringing food and water and carrying away waste. Of course, no such book would be complete without implementations of the technology that allow you to mangle PCs, and DMs will find wonderful toys to equip their tentacled villains with such as the wonderfully illustrated scorpion harness (living armor with a living weapon built right in.) This is great material, and should mix well with the flesh grafing item rules in official books such as Lords of Madness and Fiend Folio.
The chapter also includes a few psionic items.
The seventh chapter Forbidden Magic provides new spells, psionic powers, and clerical domains (darkness, domination, fear, and madness). The domains and spells are mostly usable in 3.5, though some spell changes might affect the domains (e.g., the madness spell includes eyebite, which was so wrongfully torn asunder under the 3.5 revision.) The spells are appropriately devious; imagine if the mind flayer gained intelligence when it sucked your brains out (though this particular spell, brain drain, seems a little iffy depending on how you read the rules. As I read it, you could never gain an enhancement bonus of more than +4, though it would be easy to assume that successive hits stack, which would be abusive.)
The psionic powers are mostly usable as well, but of course will lack the scaling text than many Expanded Psionics Handbook powers use.
Chapter 8 and 9 introduce new character options. It is here that the book really earns its keep in the face of Lords of Madness, which was a little short on items specifically for mind flayers. (Indeed, most of the new options in LoM seemed targeted at PC races fighting them.) A variety of prestige classes are introduced specifically for mind flayers: Aggrithid (A flayer with a thing against drow; Among other things, they gain the ranger’s favored enemy ability... curiously phrased in a way that the 3.5 change in rules need not be adjusted for), skull collector, mind eater, keeper (of lore), warrior of the violet line (sort of an flayer anti-paladin), dark slayer, and master of the flesh (a personal favorite, a master of fleshcrafting.)
One nice thing is that many of these give bonus manifester levels. At the time, that wasn’t the greatest choice since mind flayers still had spell like abilities and they had to be very high level to take advantage of some of them. That said, this convention works right into the 3.5 Expanded Psionics Handbook mechanic for mind flayers, which model their psionic abilities as psion levels.
The last two chapters take up a scant few pages, and discuss some variant background ideas and different takes on the role of mind flayers in a game.
Conclusions
I was left a little cold about how close the homage to Lovecraft’s work was in places. It’s like they didn’t so much rub the serial numbers off as scratch them a little (coincidentally, that would be a turn of the phrase I stole from one of the authors of this book...) Still, if you can overlook this, some of the background when it comes to where they came for before our world is deeper than you are provided in Lords of Madness. And though the authors obviously could not follow the official material from Illithiad and Lords of Madness precisely, they follow it closely enough that you can stick with the official take where you want but still use lots of this book.
The biggest benefits of this book if you are running a game that features mind flayers prominently as villains are the ideas and rules presented in the technology and character options chapters. Those provide some rich fodder to help make mind flayers the diverse and horrifying villains they deserve to be.
Overall grade: B+
-Alan D. Kohler
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