"A FrankT & AH Joint"
FrankT:
Mind Flayers are one of the most loved D&D monsters. They are slavers and cannibals and even quite committed moral relativists will stab them right in the face without qualms. Their brain eating, mind controlling lifestyle makes them perfect as behind-the-scenes masterminds, and they can plausibly have pretty much any kind of monster as a minion. The “Illithid Mastermind” plotline is probably about as overused as “A Doppelganger Did It”, but for some reason, we're still OK with that. Mind Flayers are also one of the few monsters that Wizards of the Coast claims “product identity” on. And while this has not stopped multiple franchises from busting out with “Brain Slayers” and “Soul Flayers” and other things that look and act exactly like Mind Flayers, you're probably wondering how the fuck WotC can claim product identity on these guys at all considering that they look and act exactly like a Mythos monster. The answer is: the Legacy of Gygax. See, back in the 70s and 80s, Gary Gygax ripped a lot of people off, and plagiarized from a lot of sources, and he backed it all up with enormous brass balls. He claimed soul authorship of D&D even though that was obviously not true, and wrote bizarre editorials claiming that anyone who played Traveler was stealing from him because he invented all things role playing related. Anyway, despite the fact that Mind Flayers are obviously derivative work, Gygax had this to say:
And unlike Arneson's contributions that Gygax spent years denying, none of the original authors of Mythos material were alive by the 1980s and no one took him to court about it. So that particular gross injustice has just sort of been left to fester.Gary Gygax wrote:The mind flayer I made up out of whole cloth using my imagination, but inspired by the cover of Brian Lumley's novel in paperback edition, The Burrowers Beneath.
AncientH:
All similarities to Larry Niven’s tentacle-mouthed, telepathic, mind-controlling aliens called the Thrint are…uh…probably on purpose.
Mind Flayers cover a lot of conceptual ground in D&D, but in their most basic configuration, they’re your bog-standard evil psychic aliens, and everything good and bad and inbetween about them tends to fall out of that. They need to eat brains because they’re evil and psychic; the need to eat human brains (and eventually, spawn using human hosts) creates your basic predator-prey dynamic, &c. Never mind that they’re basically psychic squid-headed vampires, Mind Flayers had enough Dragon Magazine articles and ancillary bits about them that TSR really could have scraped a book together on them just from that—instead, they went with Bruce Cordell.
FrankT:
So the Illithiad came out in 1998, when TSR was running out of things to say about 2nd edition and frankly looking towards 3rd edition. So they started wrapping up various book series. This is the third and final installment of the “Monstrous Arcana” series, which was like the Van Richten Guides, but without being focused on Ravenloft. The other two were “I, Tyrant” (about Beholders) and “The Sea Devils” (about Sahuagin, and written by Skip Williams). The books in the Monstrous Arcana series were each tied in to a couple of prepackaged adventures that focused on the monster in question. I have no idea why this happened. You'd think that making prepackaged adventures tied to obscure books about individual Monstrous Compendium entries would be a good way to go bankrupt – and maybe it was because all of these books were solicited during the runup to TSR's 1997 bankruptcy. In any case, we're talking about the Ilithiad Accessory, rather than any of the three “Advanced Dungeons & Dragons: Monstrous Arcana: Illithiad: Adventures”, which would be Dawn of the Overmind, Masters of Eternal Night, and A Darkness Gathering. I think I just listed them in reverse order, but I honestly don't give a shit and neither did anyone else. Which is probably why Wizards of the Coast stopped soliciting these things once they took over the company.
Anyway, the Ilithiad has six illustrators but only one author. That's Bruce Cordell, who you possibly remember from having written the worst Darksun Book ever. Or perhaps his terrible Psionics rules or his other terrible Psionics rules. The man really likes writing psionics rules and also writing things that are terrible is what I'm saying. While he was writing this, he was in a campaign which was being run by Monte Cook. The similarities between his biography and that of Mike Mearls are noted.
AncientH:
Don’t forget Hyperconscious and If Thoughts Could Kill.
It’s really hard not to point at Bruce Cordell as the Biggest Psionics Fanboy Ever. I’m not saying he started the trend, but he rode the wave, and when the wave stopped he kept on the board and started paddling in the dry sand, refusing to believe it. Psionics had always been the bastard stepchild of AD&D—too science-fiction-y for most of the fantasy buffs, and with a completely incompatible system of mechanics which even Ed Greenwood ever took half-hearted stabs at. A lot of the problem I think is that psionics in the 70s and 80s was strongly tied up to actual parapsychology research, back when a lot more people admitted that they thought maybe telepathy and telekinesis were things and had some scientific basis—but this was all X-Men type of psionic stuff, where you could add any word to “-kinesis” or “-pathy” or “psi-” and get a new power or discipline. Your only limit was your imagination and your complete collection of Man, Myth, & Magic Encyclopedia. So you had “Wild Talents,” which were basically mutant teenager kind of “you have one special power” nonsense, and then you had the Psionicist class with its staggering flexibility and limitations—the upshot of both being that where you could just give NPC Mage #3 the telekinesis spell and call him a “mind mage,” there was no way for your non-Psionicist character to ever really dabble effectively in psionics without some egregious fucking around on the part of Mister Cavern, with backstories involving psychic chirurgery, exceedingly improbably rolls on random tables, and weird psionic-magic items and potions.
Then you had monsters, and with them the rules went right out the fucking window – you could give them whatever powers that you thought made sense, and it was fine, and the world rejoiced. Now there are a lot of psionic monsters in AD&D, from the psychic skeletal floating platypus to the psychic shaggy polar-bear-man, but the Mind Flayer was the first, simplest, and most revered. Arguably though, the best part Mind Flayer lore owes itself to Charles Stross, whose Githyanki & Githzerai concepts were ripped off for the Fiend Folio long long before.
FrankT:
They took the art in a really different direction for this than they did for earlier monster materials. In many ways, this is a dry run for the art that graces the pages of 3rd edition. So the Mind Flayer in the Monstrous Compendium looks like this:
And the AD&D Mind Flayer of course looks like this:
And in the Illithiad they look like this:
And that just looks a lot more like the 3rd edition Mind Flayer, which looks like this:
I think it's the knuckles. The Mind Flayer that shows up in earlier AD&D works has basically normal human fingers (albeit only three of them), while the 3e Mind Flayer has knobby monster fingers. And the Mind Flayer in this book is more like the 3e one than the AD&D standard. It's a transitional phase.
AncientH:
Keep in mind, AD&D is also the edition that gave us the general cluster-fuck that is the Arcane vs. the Psionic Illithid – in other words, one version of Mind Flayers had spell-like abilities, and the other had psionics. This was made even more confusing because the Arcane Illithids had squid-like beak-mouths beneath their tentacles, while the Psionic Illithids had these lamprey-like tooth-lined holes.
Introduction
FrankT:
The book has three introductions, which it fits on three pages. The first one is supposedly “in character”, the others are also in character. Look, I don't fucking know, OK? The premise of the book is that it is written by a guy named Wakeman who sent his stuff to another guy named Asmus for editing and editorializing. There are mentions of other in-character books in the world, some of which are plugs for other TSR materials (such as Guide to the Underdark) and others of which are bad taste jokes. There is supposedly a book called “Mind Kampf”. I am unfortunately not making that up.
AncientH:
Asmus is a member the Arcane Order, a bizarre effort at a generic college of wizardry that AD&D started throwing into sourcebooks, I’m not even sure where they started but the College of Wizardry supplement (also written by Bruce Cordell) was all about them, and someone dredged the idea up in D&D3 for the “Mage of the Arcane Order” prestige class. What’s most memorable about the Arcane Order is they’re an early effort at presenting metamagic and the kind of versatility you see with Sorcerers in D&D3. It wasn’t very good and didn’t work well, but I think it did play a strong part in what became the D&D3 game mechanics, for good and ill.
FrankT:
The “adventure” introduction is a fairly dry account of an encounter with Grimlocks who worked for a Mind Flayer. It's flawed on several points. The opening involves the author having their team's lanterns put out with well placed crossbow bolts. That's a good Drow tactic, and a nice bit of cinematography in any case. Problem: these are Grimlocks. Grimlocks are a stone age people, who don't have any crossbows. Further, they are blind and get by on tremorsense, so they couldn't hit a lantern with a crossbow even if you gave them one. The only creature in that group of Team Monster who could even use a crossbow was the Mind Flayer itself – and it not only couldn't have used the number of crossbows described, but it's a fucking Mind Flayer and doesn't bother using crossbows. The general gist of the story is: “I screwed up and got a bunch of hirelings killed by a Mind Flayer attack before the party Fighter cut it to ribbons”. That clearly pegs it as an AD&D story, because stories like that don't really happen in 3rd edition or later versions of D&D. Still, swearing by the corpses of some unnamed characters that you're going to learn more about a group of foreigners and write it all down just lacks the narrative gravitas of swearing by your dead parents that you're going to get vengeance.
AncientH:
I blame Ed Greenwood. Honestly, this is his bag right here, and Cordell is just picking it up and running with it. That may not be entirely fair, but you have to understand that in early D&D there was basically zero division between flavor and mechanics – the Fiend Folio wasn’t some manuscript you could even pretend to read in-character as if your wizard had found it at the bottom of a Balrog’s outhouse in the old Dwarven mine, it was a straight up listing of beasties and critters with the stats right fucking there. The need and desire to wrap monsters up histories, with scholar-adventurers playing Jacques Costeau of the Underdark and such really didn’t come about until much later in Dragon Magazine, and if Greenwood didn’t invent the concept, he sure as hell perfected it in the Realms, and everybody after started copying him.
FrankT:
The final introduction is just a letter by Wakeman where he is telling someone that he has been delayed in the Underdark and is going to be researching Illithid. It conveys essentially no information and is just there to use up space.
AncientH:
Seriously, these little scroll-like things with cursive script on them are bizarre pseudodocuments that are…uh…supposed to make the readers think this is a collection of different documents? I don’t know, I’m stretching here. What I do know is that in ten or twenty years, these things are going to be nearly impenetrable because no-one teaches cursive in schools anymore.
FrankT:
Prediction: we are only three pages into the book and I am already sick of the author making up stupid pseudoscience words to describe things. “Cephalophagy” my entire ass!
AncientH:
Better grab a bottle of mead and get used to it, we have 80-odd pages to go.
Chapter 1: Illithids: What They Are
AncientH:
Chapter 1 starts with a callback to an illustration of a half-flayed nekkid illithid on the next page, which is not an encouraging sign. The pseudo-scrolls where Asmus talks directly to the reader has been replaced by a dark irregular glob that is difficult to read on hardcopy; I can only imagine how much that must fuck with your eyes trying to read a scan of it.
Most of this section is devoted to a description of Mind Flayers and their anatomy; you might think this sounds a lot like an old Dragon Magazine article on the Ecology of the Mind Flayer (#78, 1983) but you would be wrong. I checked.
FrankT:
This chapter is only 3 pages, and it is entirely composed of pseudoscience psychobabble about Mind Flayer anatomy and physiology. It's important to note that coming in to this book, Advanced Dungeons & Dragons had been pretty cavalier about making biological pronouncements that were “fucking retarded” for a great many monsters, and the Mind Flayer was if anything a worse offender than average. The Monstrous Compendium listed them as having two young each that each had a less than 50% chance of surviving to adulthood (for those keeping track at home, that means the entire species would die out in a generation or two), and couldn't make up its damn mind whether they have lamprey mouths or beaks. This book sides with the lamprey mouths, but has a little disclaimer about how reports exist of beaks and shit instead if you're in to that.
AncientH:
The stats and mechanics (including a detailed table of Mind Flayer Infravision ranges) are kept away from the biology lesson in shaded boxes. This is not overly helpful, but it is at least a start in the division between fluff and crunch which D&D would eventually start using more often.
FrankT:
One of the most fundamental problems with this book is that they make Mind Flayers look stupid without their robes on. It's a big problem drawing cool looking Mind Flayers without robes, that is why they are usually shown in robes, but this book falls down on that job. Being basically evil cephalopods, you kind of expect them to be smooth and tentacly under the kimono, but we are expected to believe that they look like ropy methheads in sumo diapers with octopus heads grafted on top. That's a lot less like a brain eating alien monster and a lot more like a bad special effect from a 50s sci fi vehicle.
AncientH:
The anatomy section quickly goes from “interesting in a morbid kind of way,” to “fuck, I’m bored.” There’s a level of detail here that goes beyond the necessary, and there’s a lot of “oh-fuck-I’m-special” sauce included:
The eyes of a living illithid are featureless and white, similar in appearance to blind cave fish that have evolved away from the need to register visible light. This comparison, however, is inaccurate. Illithids actually possess supernormal visual capacities in the infrared spectrum; the pale sclera coating illithid eyes screens out all visible light, but allows infrared light easily.
The sclera also insulates the illithid's own body heat from its infravisual organs. Thus, illithids always perceive the world with infravision, whether in the dark or in bright light Unlike other races that possess less developed senses of infravision, the illithids' infravisual clarity compares favorably with normal vision within its functional range. This range decreases in brighter light due to the increasing "polarization" of the white sclera.
FrankT:
The play by play on Mind Flayer organs and anatomy is too boring to go into much detail on. It's clear that we are reading a three page tirade about anatomy from someone who does not actually know any anatomy. There isn't much of interest here, and it skives off to rant about the various modifiers Illithid get from having different ears than humans. This gives them a -10% chance to hear noises. I don't know what that means! Hearing noises is only resolved with a percentile roll in 2nd edition AD&D when you are using the Thief/Bard ability “Hear Noise”. Mind Flayers are not, and cannot be Thieves or Bards, so I have no idea how or when that would or even could come up.
AncientH:
As a fun side-game in reading this book, imagine how much of this can be used for Mind Flayer erotic fanfic:
Yes, Illithids secrete psi-lube to ease their penetration of your planar membrane!While regulating skin moisture is vital, illithid mucous serves another equally important role in illithid physiology: The mucous is partially psi-active. Sages theorize that this mucous acts as a psychic resonator, amplifying the personal psionic might of individual illithids and reducing the mental strain of psychoportive powers by easing illithid penetration into the Astral and Ethereal Planes.
FrankT:
One of the weirdest points in this book is where the author has decided that he needs to make Mind Flayers more unlikeable by having them get a raging hermaphroditic hardon for destroying the Sun. I have no idea why they would give an actual shit one way or the other, and narratively I don't see why it's necessary. They are already brain eating slavers. You don't need any other reason to hate them, they are already brain eating slavers. Like the bad guys in Django, but with more cannibalism. There doesn't need to be another shoe to drop.
AncientH:
Destroying the sun is actually a throwback to old Mind Flayer lore, so I won’t blame Cordell for that one…much. Part of the problem here is that Mind Flayers pre-Cordell aren’t terribly complicated – they’re inhuman brain-eating psionic slavers. That’s four different sci-fi/fantasy tropes right there. Everything else is gravy—or maybe too many spices spoiling the soup. Anyway, the brain-fucking reproduction is in the next chapter.
"I love you for your spacious and easily accessible braincase."
