The malefic Outsiders of the astral void beyond the Earth are myriad in the Latter Age, but few are as distinct from the hosts of horrors as the beings known popularly as Mind Flayers. Though they are believed to be long extinct, they still feature promptly in folklore and popular entertainments, attesting to their hold over humankind's collective imagination.
Little is known for certain about these beings. In Denizens of the Beyond by Pseudo-Vespydron, the most widely known work to examine them in detail, Mind Flayers are said to have come from the sphere of Mars, but whether they are natives to that world or from some even more distant home, even Denizens rather credulous author does not say.
Pseudo-Vespydron uncritically accepts the cephalopod-headed humanoid appearance of popular portrayals and the idea that they were obligate consumers of human brains. The later (and comparatively more sober) histories of Malgrunda note no reliable descriptions of their physical form exist and put forward the theory that their purpose in preying upon the Earth was to acquire not foodstuffs but slave minds, derived from the destructive mapping of the brains of still-living captives. Perhaps the only place where she might be criticized in straying from established fact is in the time she devotes to Hseng's baseless assertion that the cephalopod skull is actually the memory of an environmental helmet with attached manipulators.
7 comments:
Sweet Jeff Dee pic! Where’s it from?
It's actually Willingham. From the back cover of the module Descent into the Depths of the Earth.
Oops -- was viewing on my phone, couldn't read the Willingham signature. Now I see it online: cover of D1-2. It's a great one, never seen it before.
Right, I see it now. That set up with the muscle-bound dude getting brain-sucked evokes an old Conan comic book where he gets mind-invaded by a one-off humanoid brain-sucker monster with a tentacle mouth in just the same way... Marvel playing fast and loose with TSR IP, no doubt.
I always loved the gruesome futility of the lady leaping out with color spray ready to go. What's that going to do to it? Communicate with it? It's not like they use those eyes to see.
If I were going to do a significant homebrew variation on mind flayers, I think I'd take my inspiration from ERB's Barsoomian kaldanes and rykors rather than the D&D originals. The heck with just eating your brains, they'd be lopping off your whole noggin and riding your decapitated corpse around as a puppet. The old Marvel Comics John Carter series had a story where a kaldane king was doing something similar with hybrid kaldane/red martian bodies, as well as dabbling in brain transplantation in general. I forget if Ras Thavas ever found out about it, but I'm sure he'd have an opinion about it if he did.
13th Age did something a bit like that with their intellect devourers, who essentially shrink down and phase inside the skull of their victims, devouring the brain and replacing it to use the body as their own. If you beat the body down the ID would revert to its normal size, bursting the skull in an explosion of gore and bone fragments.
@Bombasticus None of the four editions of D&D rules I have handy make mind flayers unusually resistant to color spray, and they certainly aren't blind. They consistently have either infravision or darkvision, and lack blindsight or similar exotic senses that would let them ignore visual magical effects. IIRC there was at least one TSR adventure that included a mind flayer who'd gotten stoned by a medusa and was part of her statue collection.
Also, who says that's color spray? That could just as easily be Willingham's take on prismatic spray, and the caster has just written off her brainless former ally there as a lost cause.
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