Chainlink #10: Better Magic Item Shops

As they are typically presented, magic item shops  are what I call "cheesecake fantasy," which is to say, they take the same approach to fantasy that pin-ups take to sex. It's artificial, easily digestible, without a terrible amount of substance. Cheesecake can be fun but it's too rich to stomach outside of small quantities. To me, if an element is cheesecake-y, it feels fake, like it's part of some artifice for players with no attempt at fitting itself into a plausible, thought out world. Magic item shops evoke this feeling in me for three reasons:

1. D&D economies are typically a bit weird and nonsensical at base, but magic items call more attention to that than most other things. Who can afford to pay so much for these things? Certainly not very many people. How are they staying in business? I don't know, it doesn't need to make total sense, but right now it feels as though the concept makes zero sense. 
2. In my experience, magic item shops take a lot of cues from antique dealers and curio shops, things that really belong in a more Victorian setting. I know most D&D games aren't strictly grounded in any one time period (my setting certainly isn't) but the obvious energy of anachronism feels very noticeable, and is perhaps the most responsible for the cheesecake feel of the concept. I  don't want my grimdark-caked boots to track all that Fuzzy-Middle-Ages over Pumat Sol's Early-Modern carpet. 
3. Magic items as presented in a shop feel less like legendary treasures and more like shiny souvenirs. I want them to feel impressive or legendary, but that's undercut by there being a whole shop of them sitting just around the block. It's like buying a lightsaber toy at Disneyland.

Now, despite all of that, I like the idea of alternate ways to obtain items, and, if it can be managed, things that players can sink their gold into. So, if we like the purpose magic item shops fill, what does a version of them more in line with a medieval fantasy setting look like? It should be noted I'm going purely off of vibes here. Maybe what I'm about to say is totally anti-medieval. But, given I don't tend to play with medievalists, vibes will do for now. 

First big change, they probably shouldn't be shops in the traditional sense. Buying magic items involves tracking down exceptionally gifted craftsmen with a talent for the mystic arts, so wizards.

Sidebar: One of the assumptions I've started to develop is that mage isn't necessarily a job in and of itself. People learn the art and carry it with them into their regular crafts. Granted, most of these wizards are still hermits, vagrants, ascetics, or any other variety of isolationist weirdos. But it's not unusual to find great blacksmiths, seamstresses, or potters amongst their ranks. Those towers get boring and lonely, you've gotta have a couple of ways to fill the time.

These guys are the closest thing to normal magic item shops, but they probably don't have any sort of back stock, meaning you're commissioning items, not buying them, and they only work with a handful of mediums. Find a wizard who's also a gifted potter, that guy can make you magical pots. He can't do swords, or boots, or cloaks. To me, it makes sense that these folks wouldn't have much use for gold (or actively eschew it) if they're not spending much time within society*. You'll have to pay in some other way, either through bartering or deeds. 

These folks will vary in terms of their capabilities and quality. Some will be smiths of merely exceptional talent, and accordingly, only able to produce rudimentary magical items. Others will be ranked amongst the greatest craftsmen to ever live, and will be accordingly able to create items of far superior quality. These folks are rarer, even more anti-social, and more expensive, but in my mind they're usually less ascetic, and more rich weirdo, so they'll probably accept gold. 

I've been mostly describing these folks as outcasts since I usually want there to be a bit of separation between the supernatural and the average citizen in my worlds, but I think if you find yourself in a big city, you'll probably be able to buy things like potions and scrolls, which I conceptualize of as taking less magical talent to craft than other items. Spell scrolls you can probably get from the scribe's guild, where they have one poor sop who can cast half a cantrip before she gets dizzy sitting in a room cranking out a scroll every week. It's painstaking, boring work, but access to low grade magic is pretty game changing for people, and the nobility will pay handsomely for such magics. I figure potions are something that you can get from folk healers or doctors who may have a slight aptitude for magic. 

I think the big takeaway I have from thinking this through is that specificity goes a long way here. Magic item shops as they usually exist are too broad and fuzzy to feel particularly real or grounded. If you narrow their scope and recontextualize them a bit, they don't feel quite as off when slotted into the standard fantasy milieu. I had a fair amount of ideas when writing this post, and I'll probably be back next time with some riffs on the ideas contained within. Probably a list of magic item merchants. 

*What does this wizard need gold for? Roll 1d4

1: Alchemy. They thinks the secret to immortality is tied to the metal, and are trying to create a tincture from gold that will extend his life.

2: They're running low on supplies, and will need to travel to the city to buy ink, paper, chickens, drugs, etc.

3: They owe a yearly tithe to a powerful monster (dragon, beholder, etc) in exchange for a particular service. 75% chance it's just a protection racket.

4: They're building a giant statue out of gold and they need every little bit they can get.

Wizard Cancer

This one wound up more ghoulish than expected. Don't know how canon it is. Everything within probably happens, but not regularly. 

Cancer has been with us for as long as we have fought not to die. It is an unraveling of the self as a unit working towards a singular goal, a parasite that emerges from within the self as a result of traumatic, microscopic damage to some of the smallest component parts of our being. Cancer disregards its place as part of a functioning whole, seeking only to grow and consume, to its own detriment, and eventual extinction. Cancer is chaos, hunger, life incarnate.

The universe is unraveling. It does not remember what it is, how it should function. It is at war with itself. Its brain is filled with tumors. Magic is the milk of reality's cancer, the ultimate product of its slow decay. The use of magic, therefore, begets cancer. The presence of the arcane within a body is often at risk of sending one's cells into the deepest sort of katabasian spiral, a maddening, nigh unstoppable descent. Many elder wizards are full of cancers. Their throats swell with rocky lumps, their tongues swell, their fingers bulge. Their poor brains are packed full of tumors, smooth and slick, jostling along with the tides of thought like stones worn smooth at the bottom of a riverbed.

Wizard's Cancer

Among those who practice the art, there are many folk traditions that they embrace to ward off the disease. Scarification and ritual tattoos in vulnerable areas of the body, and piercings of silver and gold are said to help. Most wizards have elaborate tattoos all along their hands, sometimes on their throats, and silver piercings through their tongues. Some go further, piercing their ears, noses, lips, cheeks, or foreheads (usually this means something resembling a dermal piercing but some do drive spikes into their own heads). Wizards use staves and wands to distance themselves from their magic, hoping the wood will bear the cancer for them (when it works, the wood gnarls, which is why they always have those twisting, knobbly things instead of straight canes). Surgical removal of tumors is often attempted to varying degrees of success. Wizards rarely throw these tumors away, once removed.

Wizard Cancers

A wizard's tumor is a dangerous and sometimes valuable thing. They are treasured the most by other wizards and occultists. They are good offerings to spirits and gods, they are powerful reagents in spells and potions. Eating one is said to bolster your power, or bestow blessings upon your bloodline. Sometimes a tumor has magic of its own. When you kill a wizard, that magic might activate, whether as an explosion of their bottled up potential magical energy, or as fleshy serpents peeling their way out of the cadaver and leaping towards you with gummy mouths.  

Cancer Wizards

Because they're so valuable, some wizards cultivate cancer, in themselves or others. Growing tumors is a delicate art rooted in biomancy and beast magic, with its own practices and ethos. Common hosts include one's self, farm animals, familiars, or apprentices. This is generally a good reason to be wary of wizards that have had lots of apprentices or who keep many at once, they might be keeping the majority of you around for subtle (but often ruinous) experiments. Tumor growth can be used offensively theoretically, if you make them grow fast enough, but it's such a slow death that it's not particularly common for biomancers to whip this technique out against you, unless they're really good at it. Some people might think to use it as a weapon for assassination, but it's often too slow for that too. Better to just push the king down the stairs and make it look like an accident.

Cancer Wizards?

Sometimes, contact with a powerful source of magical radiation will cause tumors to grow within a person that have the initial magical waveform scraped into their DNA. This usually results in the person with the tumor being capable of magic, often pretty powerful stuff, at the cost of their bodily health. Using the tumor feeds the tumor and encourages further rebellion. Such mages burn bright and fast, and are often dead within a handful of years, if not months. Their cancers are the second most valued by other wizards. The first most valued are the ones that can talk. 

Cancer Wizards!

It's super rare, but it happens. It takes a potent magically charged tumor, ideally one developed from brain tissue. If it gets big enough and is fed consistently, it can awaken. Often these tumors seek to usurp their hosts, and sometimes they succeed, replacing their brains fully, or extracting themselves from their hosts. Some powerful wizards are actually tumors grown from the people they appear to be. If they haven't body jacked their host, they will be, to be delicate, fucking disgusting looking. Giant ambulatory tumors are just really horrible to look at. They might embrace it, or they might seek to use beast magic to modify their form into something more personable. 

Chainlink #9: Elven Spirit Abuse

Elves are from a planet millions of lightyears away, or perhaps from an alternate dimension where life evolved somewhat differently. They're pretty much all dead now (the ones that came to Coris, at least). They arrived as refugees from a great calamity, explorers seeking new horizons, or, most prevalently, the losers in some great, GOT ass power struggle. Nobody knows about this because elves are all dead, but bits and pieces of it survive in myths about the elves (every culture on Coris has a story about the fallen angels or heavenly bodies which enslaved the world before the gods seared them from the face of the planet). Elven spiritual philosophies and belief systems were as varied as those of humanity but the ones that came to Coris mostly subscribed to the three soul model, because the faschy populist uprising that got exiled here used it as their guiding philosophy. Beings may have an animating soul, which gives life and seeks to grow, an aspirant soul, which grants desire and seeks carnal pleasures and food, and a knowing soul, that wants to understand the world, and bestows intelligence. Plants have only an animating soul, animals have an animating and aspirant soul, and intelligent beings (like the elves) have all three. This is a common idea in elven mysticism and there are some branching philosophies around what exactly the three souls mean, but the common take amongst Coris's population is that the goal of an elf is to ascend to immortality by merging their souls into a perfect union of growth, desire, and knowing. 

Some of that is fun but it does feel a bit too "pretty," so I'm not sure if I'm gonna keep it. Whatever, it's not really something that players are supposed to interface with, unless I'm running a particularly ancient game where elves still exist and have debates about whether or not humanity possesses a knowing soul (they'd like to think they don't, because it makes the subjugation and enslavement a bit more morally defensible, in their eyes). Whatever the case, elves have a weird relationship with souls and spirits and ghosts and shit. They had very little against necromancy of the soul, it was one of the bedrocks of elven styled magic. This is because when someone dies, their aspirant soul is the thing that becomes a ghost, the animating soul just kinda gets obliterated and the knowing soul cycles back through the elven realm of wisdom, where its contents will be disseminated amongst the knowing souls of the newborn. The aspirant soul is an ugly pitiful thing by itself, and it's basically fine to just torture it however you see fit, according to the elves. This means if you're an elven warrior and you're fighting alongside a compatriot, and you catch a shitty human arrow in the neck, not only do you wind up bleeding to death painfully, your buddy is also probably gonna rip the ghost out of your body and either use it as a shield pack or chuck it at the shitty human archers where it'll explode in a shower of agonizing ghost fire. In some cases your ghost might get kept around as a sort of spirit assassin or something, controlled by a grand elven necromancer, in which case your agony doesn't just last for a few hours, but all of eternity. 

Elves generally have very little sympathy for the dead, as I'm sure you can infer from those two little tidbits of info. Death is a personal failure. You should've lived forever if you didn't want your ghost to be tortured for all eternity. It's not even all of you being tortured, just your core personality without any of its memories or anything like that. Don't worry about it too much. 

A lot of magic items made during the period of Elven rule are powered by elf ghosts. It's the only way to make the sentient ones, or at least, it's the easiest way. It's so easy to use elven ghosts to make sentient magic items that sometimes magic items made in this way just sorta become self aware like skynet which is frankly reason enough to not do it, but they're super powerful so if you're a shitty space elf you might decide the risk is worth the reward. 

The most common way of binding elven ghosts was in small stone or wooden dowels, about 5 inches in length and an inch in diameter, carved with runes. This practice was super widespread, even outside of military usage. Most elves wore a necklace with a little carved idol on it containing their grandpa or mom or brother's spirit, which could whisper little affirmations in their ears and give them advice on how to navigate strategically difficult situations. If you were a soldier you'd probably get your idol stuck inside an automaton with a bunch of other idols steering the thing and fighting for ultimate control. Sometimes you can still find these little idols with their spirits in tact. They might know important knowledge or something, but 99,999 times out of 100,000 they are terribly fucked up after spending millennia inside of a fucking rock, and so they will not be very reliable. Most of them want to get out and will say or do anything they can to accomplish this. 

Sometimes the thing inside of the idol isn't even an elf ghost, they really did not discriminate when it comes to spiritual manipulation. Nature spirits, demons, human souls, you name it, elves would've put it in a stick and used it to power their house. They were very bad people.

Spirit prisons are a common find when digging through elven ruins. Despite the most common form being small cylinders, the ones that survived the ravages of time while holding onto their prisoners tend to be more intricate, artistic pieces. This is not due to the shape of the vessel per se, it's just that the higher quality prisons were usually only available to the wealthy, and thus were made with more care in all respects. When these statues are found by human(etc) cultures, they are hauled off and marveled at. Sometimes they get interpreted as idols housing a god or at the very least serving as a mouthpiece for one (and depending on what's inside the idol, this interpretation may not be all that far off). Some mages have libraries full of these things, they are very prized amongst wizards who want to figure out how to reverse engineer the technology. Deliver them to a wizard, and they'll pay you quite well, if they don't decide to slam your consciousness into one of their homemade soul prisons for practice. Wizards are really terrible, aren't they?

Planes of Non-existence

There’s no truly unified theory of magic in Coris, because magic is inherently a rogue element in an otherwise stable reality, and its practices are extremely culturally specific and spiritual in nature. Basically, nobody is thinking about studying magic as a scholarly pursuit until rather late in the game, and even when they start, things are…messy. That said, I'm at privilege to illuminate some of the particulars, what with my god’s eye view as the creator of the setting. To their credit, the scholar mages of Coris’s Age of Enlightenment will figure out a fair deal of this, but they will also be very very wrong about a lot of it, and follow it to conclusions that it can’t really support, because again, magic is a rogue element in reality. 

Universal Madness

The universe in which Coris sits is older than ours by a wide margin. Originally, the laws of reality worked as intended, but in its senescence, reality has developed a sort of dementia, forgotten that it is not alive, and that it cannot hear the wishes of those who live atop it. It’s all very confusing for the universe, and it’s doing the best it can to ignore the stimuli of the churning, wonderful, improbable existence of itself, but its will is just not what it used to be, frankly. Sometimes, when one of the infinitesimally small things that lives atop it speaks a command in its language (that of its creator, who left long ago), it can’t help but bend the rules a bit. It’s not intentional disobedience, mind, after all, it’s starting to forget what the rules even are.

When the universe wants to enact change, the easiest way is to open a small pocket of itself to allow access to somewhere else. These planes, as they will be called when they are discovered, are sort of like staging areas of reality, or stores of raw material which were used in its creation. They are almost all infinite, making them good sources of energy to draw from. They’re all totally inhospitable, despite the typical usage of plane in D&D vernacular. The wizards who will try to travel to these planes will all meet gruesome, agonizing ends on account of this fact. They simply don't support life, or at least, not our lives. Each plane has its own properties, lending themselves well to different tasks. Here’s a handful of them. 

Stella Invictus

The victorious star, also called the Grey Light by some, or the Old Well in some older traditions. This is an important, fundamental source of magic, one that most traditions rely on. It's pretty boring, as far as they go, it's basically just a universe full of infinite energy. Wizards like this one because it lets them sling fireballs and lightning bolts, which is almost a universal fascination amongst magic users. It's a difficult source to master, for energy does not flow out of the Well gently. Interestingly, it can be harder to get just a drop of the star's power than a whole stream. This is why most apprentice wizards are taught simple light spells early on, it teaches them discipline before they get to disintegration beams, so they know how to actually stop the magic once its served its purpose.

During the industrial revolution some wizards will figure out they can use this dimension to generate infinite power, and it will almost universally go horribly wrong. A bit later down the line some people will develop a more stable means of accessing it, but the generators they need to turn it into a workable industrial power source have a tendency to blow up like Chernobyl times one billion. Working in one also gives you super cancer, which, not incidentally, being a wizard also typically does. Oops!

Division

Known to some as the Edgeless Sharp or Severance or a hundred other names for blades, Division is a plane made up entirely of cutting. The plane is a flat circle, a continuous cutting motion. This one is super easy to access because people really like to kill each other with swords, and so the universe has sort of let the borders between here and there slip since the violence seems pretty normal to it at this point. Accessing Division lets you sever without a blade, which is not always used for violence, surprisingly. It excises tumors, it cleaves spacetime to hasten travel, ends relationships. Mostly though it lets you do shit like this.

A beloved tool of heartless murderers and poor swordsmen. Since it's relatively easy to tap into (compared to the other dimensions, that is, it still requires a monkish devotion to the craft by any layperson's estimate), it's not unlikely to encounter a "mage" who can only draw from Division. Orders of monastic warriors master its usage without words, save for maybe a brusque command ("cleave" or "split") hurled heavy at their target like stone bullets from a sling. Division often seeks to steer its users into a state of baseless violence to test their will, so it's regarded as a tool to be used sparingly and with great consideration amongst actual wizards. Still, the temptation to wield the dimensional blade of want is powerful once you've seen it cut.

Tiamat

Also the name of a god/demon/monster in some mythologies, said to be the mother of dragons and potentially the origin of all life. The plane of Tiamat is one of reptile flesh and poison, an unending, infinite gyre of squirming, scaled tendrils. Tiamat is a font of raw material, to be sculpted as the user sees fit. Invaluable for beast mages, and for armies. In the past, the mystery cult of Tiamat was able to sponsor invasions by sending their wizard-priests alongside their armies. The flesh drawn from Tiamat was consumed by the soldiers, turning the inner circle of the cult into walking pantries. The ability to offer fresh meat of decent quality was also a powerful diplomatic tool that could be used to sway the fealty of a lord's peasantry. 

Drawing power from Tiamat is seen as taboo in some parts of the world in part because of these practices. The magic represented a strategic power that the established Athic lords were unable to fully deal with, so mages who attempted to utilize the art were hunted with extreme prejudice. It became a lost art, and the consumption of the flesh was said to be linked to disease, immoral behavior, and demonic possession. Disease was indeed a risk when the summoning was done by an inexperienced user of the craft, but the greatest effect of the flesh's consumption was mutation. Granted, this happened on a slow enough time scale that it was invisible for several generations. In places where the practice managed to stick, genetic drift has led to a greater prevalence of the hornéd folk.

The Depths

An eternal ocean of darkness, thick and impenetrable as ink. The waters of the Sea of Night are drawn upon to form the black mists which make up most temporary magical constructs and illusions. This mist can also obscure, create darkness, soften footsteps, so on and so forth. This plane is also very well known for its inhabitants; there are strange and terrible things within the sunken sea, living lives unburdened by the sun. They can be drawn out too, if one is skilled enough. This is a bad idea for two reasons. One, they owe you no fealty, and two, they die just as quickly in our dimension as we would in theirs. They're very chaotic summons because of this, which can be useful if you're in a broken arrow type situation and you need to create a big, horrible distraction (emphasis on horrible) but if you are attempting to commune with the creatures as some scholar mages foolishly try, 99 times out of 100, you and your frat buddies are going to be found smeared against the wall while the thing from beyond the pale pops and hisses out of existence in a flurry of steaming organs and gouts of colorless flame.

This one is dangerous because it calls out to you. The Deep sings to mages in their sleep, whispers to them, lets its ink black tendrils slip into the subconscious mind, batting about the id like a cat would idly play with string. It's no wonder people think that the life which dwells in their waters is intelligent, with the way the Depths themselves cry out for attention. The things that live within the Deep don't tend to have an interest in us, but the Deep certainly does. More people enter this dimension than the others, certain some apotheosis awaits them, but inevitably they end up drowning, forever adrift in a pitch black sea.

Divinity

Most planes encountered have a sort of...will, to them. They're not entirely sapient or even sentient, if they live they live like jellyfish and amoebas. Some are much smarter. Division and the Depths are thought to be rather cunning. Speaking to them is mostly impossible, but their will is felt by mages who tap into their power. Some try to conceptualize of them as very large, very powerful spirits, who have a metaphysical mass greater than known terrestrial spirits, and this isn't an inappropriate comparison. Spirits, the lesser kinds, such as elementals, demons, and ghosts, are almost like planes in miniature, which exist in close proximity to our own world. They are much more comprehensible than true planes though. They can be placated and befriended, or bound and forced into servitude. Planes cannot. When you access a plane, when you truly tap into its power, you are not in the driver's seat. It steers you. 

Chainlink #8: Predator Gods

Goblins used to have many gods, now they have less. Here is why.

Some generations ago, the seven clans of the Hebi came from beyond the mountains, riding through the snow atop four legged beasts, black dogs weaving between their legs, baying and growling like devils. They were a conquering people, and everything about them seemed to be made for war. Standing an imposing 5 feet tall, the hobgoblins were indeed a force to be reckoned with. They practiced fire magic, and tamed horses and wolves. They made saunas and hot springs, charted the stars, and baked black bread in dense stone ovens. They conquered and pillaged, and built an empire on soot. It was a modest empire, compared to the kingdoms found beyond the reaches of goblin territory, but it was still large enough to rival some of the great kingdoms of man. They built roads and fortresses, turned villages into cities, then built walls about them, thick and sturdy. For all of this, they demanded tribute from their subjects. 

The gods of the Hebi people were mighty, and like all gods, they were hungry. They were dying too, a war in heaven leaving them wounded and scarred. To feed their gods and to mend their wounds for a time, they needed blood. Animal sacrifice was a daily occurrence in their empire (and was even before the hobgoblins arrived), slaughtered farm animals or captured game were bled atop the fire. The sacrifice of other goblins was more controlled, a punishment for prisoners and war captives, as much a display of power and state authority as it was a religious rite. Highest of all forms of sacrifice, though, was the sacrifice of other gods. The gods of the Hebi were cannibalistic, predatory things, and in the dark of night they bayed for the blood and meat of their kin. The Hebi thus fed many gods to the pyre, which is a difficult task, because the gods of this world are not tangible things of flesh and blood, but spirits. Killing a god means the burning of hundreds of priests who know their rites, the destruction of their temples and idols, the annihilation of their memory. The Hebi did not do this because they hated these other gods, or because they saw them as false. They were very much real, that was necessary in fact, but they were weak in comparison to their own predator gods, and their victory over the conquered clans required appropriate tribute.

Many of the old goblin gods were annihilated in this way, their priests and temples burned in post-battle frenzies. They were given the Hebi's gods to worship in turn, which they did, and slowly the old ways became more distant. The predator gods were seen to be very strong, for they had carried the Hebi to victory, and even if they did not eat other gods, they could protect their flock from any retribution associated with the desecration of sacred grounds. Thusly, these new gods were embraced and worshiped with devotion, and blood flows freely upon the stone of their altars, even now that the Hebi have fallen. The Hebi were, as common wisdom states, forsaken by their gods for their profane deeds, for lying with their wolves as though they were goblins. Another story for another time.

Chainlink# 7.5: Illithid Zoo

I was having a conversation with a friend about illithids, and she had a pretty novel idea that got my gears turning a bit. Essentially, present the illithids as a force sorta like the Combine from Half Life 2, which she tells me were less of a specific species of being and more like a hodgepodge of "domesticated" species. Great, very creepy, and very stolen by me. So, here are some vassal species of the former illithid empire. All of them can be found in small pockets across our fantasy planet where the mind flayers now hide, but some are more common than others. They're created through clone technology, and are pretty far removed from their original biological processes of reproduction and behavior. It's possible that the native humanoids of this planet will reach such a point as well, should the illithids win. The original names of these species aren't known, only their equivalent designations in the illithid language.

Type 1: Visced (Dogs)

Quadrupedal bodies, with bug like segmented carapaces. The torso is bulbous and potbellied, reminiscent of an aphid's body. Their heads have large slashing maws, oriented sideways, like pincers, bedazzled with red, beady eyes. On their chests, they have two smaller limbs which stay tucked close to their body, like a praying mantis's claws. They aren't especially sophisticated limbs but they can still manipulate objects, and on occasion you will see one with a broken down laser gun strapped to its chest, looking something like a camera worn on a strap about one's neck. 

They are soldiers first and foremost. They're quick and efficient with their hunting, and their illithid modifications mean that they can work as a sort of collective hivemind, bouncing thoughts and attack patterns back and forth between one another's brains with great speed. They can also spray their foes with acid, which is always a plus. Their relative scrawny frames means they're not great for manual labor, so they tend to be one of the less popular morphs employed by colonies, who are more interested in hiding than in fighting. Still, they are very good at what they do, and so some groups that employ a more aggressive abduction policy might keep them around for raids or hunts. 

Type 2: Szedi (Seals)

Resembles something between an ichthyosaur and a sea lion in body plan. They have large, multifaceted eyes and bodies covered in white bristly fur. Where the mouth would be on any ordinary animal, there is a large tentacle with a sort of hexagonal shape to it. The tentacle can split open like a flower, revealing the actual beast's mouth. Each sixth of the split tentacle is lined with small needle teeth.

They are fully and completely aquatic, and are therefore used by the flayers who take refuge on the sea floor. They serve as scouts, explorers, laborers, and guards. Their tentacles are surprisingly strong, and can perform a variety of complex tasks. When they fight you, they'll go for your limbs, closing their appendage around an arm or a leg, before twisting violently. A few seconds of this will probably leave the limb torn and mangled beyond repair.

Type 3: C'chetil (Leeches)

These things are small, and really less of a worker than a tool. Small, chubby worms, about the size of a fist, pale white. Blue veins crisscross their bodies beneath their rubbery skin. You can faintly see where their eyes used to be, now recessed and covered with skin, a vestigial organ, as sensory input is no longer a necessity for these lifeforms. Essentially just a stomach/digestive tract and brain. They are, in effect, very powerful calculators. 

They lack the ability to perform the more nuanced tasks of a brain computer, but they're exceptionally versatile. They can crunch numbers, calculate the appropriate trajectories necessary for interdimensional space travel, or act as a private journal. To use one  requires letting it latch onto you (typically mind flayers do this at the base of their skull), at which point it starts connecting to your brain through a psionic link, while drinking your blood. It's possible to train them to only respond to specific brain waves, effectively "locking" them against an intruder's peeping thoughts, or even to deliver psionic attacks to whatever they're attached to. Some colonies have figured out how to get them to mindjack a body and control it for a while, but such a strenuous task has a very real possibility of making them explode in a shower of tepid goo.

Type 4: Lithet (Apes)

Giant four limbed creatures. They walk like gorillas, but are far taller than they are wide, and are much leaner. No fur to speak of, they're covered in rough, grey scales.  Their tongues are long, muscular, and prehensile, with light barbs across the surface. They can use them to manipulate more delicate tools which their hands would not operate, but even so, they risk breaking objects not designed to accommodate their girth.

These guys are common as laborers, guards, and livestock, since they have five brains (one primary one, and four sophisticated brain-like nerve clusters that run down their spine). Typically they lack psionic capabilities, but their clusters mean they serve as potent amplifiers for psionic activity. Having one nearby is like juicing for illithids, it gives them a potent reservoir of mental energy to draw on as they perform psionic tasks. That and their giant size makes them exceptionally well suited towards being bodyguards as well, which can be eaten under emergency situations (they can lose 2-3 of their secondary brains before they actually die, at the cost of reduced coordination and a lesser psionic resevoir).

Type 5: Ngthed (Satellites)

If you didn't know any better, it would be easy to assume these things weren't alive. They're roughly spherical (more like a many sided polyhedron), with a segmented chitinous shell surrounding their body. Like a weird, quasi-organic soccer ball. Their otherwise uniform shape is broken by a set of several multifaceted eyes along one side of their body. They do have limbs, four tentacle like structures lined with sticky filaments, along with two wide "wings" of sorts, large crescent shaped sheets of white gauze like skin. Most of the time they remain tucked away beneath their shells. No mouths, they photosynthesize. 

They're the illithid's equivalent of spy satellites, they even communicate with one another through radio waves. They hover due to an innate psionic ability instilled in them long ago, allowing them to enter the lower atmospheres of planets. Previously, they lived exclusively in space, or the uppermost reaches of the atmosphere, using their gossamer wings to float along, collecting the sun's energy. Now, they keep tabs on nearby human communities, absorbing data, tracking movement, keeping tabs on important figures. They're not great fighters, but they can disorient foes with targeted electromagnetic bursts, or, failing that, ram into them with their bodies. They are also a delicacy amongst illithids due to their unique brain structures, though their consumption is tricky, as they are resource intensive to clone and very useful for avoiding conflicts with humans. 

Type 6: Illishen (Chirurgeons)

They are not a separate species from illithid, but rather the result of a tadpole raised in specific conditions. They are fed grey matter of exceptional quality, but never allowed to implant into a host. They receive several augmentations and are dosed with hormones that guide their growth, turning them into a strange bulbous sort of thing, with a head like a ball. They are permanently fused with several c'chetil, and have four metallic stilt like legs grafted onto their body. They are given arms as well, fit with a vast array of surgical tools. 

They are responsible for raising the clones of a colony. Their specific shape is necessary for the task because they are both surgeon and incubator, for at least the early stages of a clone's life. Their body serves as a genetic library, with a catalogue of all illithid servitor species. They use their body to "print" the early stages of a given clone, typically some sort of fetal being, until it can be surgically excised by their own hand, and nested inside of the cold embrace of a glass tube. They are also exceptional medics and researchers, and specialize in mending wounds and vivisecting test subjects. In some colonies, they hold positions of power, and may serve as trusted leaders. In others, they are treated as just another class of servitor.

The End

Rarely you may find an illithid implanted into one of these bodies rather than a human form, though this practice is uncommon. Illithids regard non-humanoid body plans as less aesthetically desirable and unwieldy. Plus, the brain matter required for an illithid to come out as normal needs to be of decent quality, and the poor cloning capabilities of modern colonies means that every part of a servitor is filled with tumors. 

Illithid clones are not self sufficient, and not especially intelligent, but it should be noted that all of these beings were descended from species capable of sophisticated thought, love, art, culture, etc, before the illithid colony went and made genetically modified drones out of them. Somewhere out there, they still exist too. On some Jovian moon, warrior clans of alien dogs war with one another for the honor of their liege lords, and sing chittering songs beneath the night time glow of the gas giant that they orbit.  Strange, benthic worms, not measured in inches but in feet, glide through their homes, juggling between five conversations at once while they suck the black blood of sea-cows into their mouths. Numerous ball like beings sit locked in blissful orbit around their white dwarf star, singing hymns that glide on the solar winds towards the antennae of other disciples. It is even theoretically possible you could meet any one of them, somehow. They would surely fight alongside you against their once-oppressors with a righteous hatred. They would see the strange creatures that were created from their brethren and react with the same mix of hatred, disgust, and sorrow that you would upon finding human sleeper agents, because they hate illithids just as you do. Illithids are the worst.

An Anti Categorization Screed

There's this thing that I find very displeasing about D&D lore that I've realized is sorta *the* thing I find displeasing about D&D lore. It's the game's obsession with boxes, and fitting things into them.

I mean seriously, the game is utterly chock full of needlessly extensive taxonomy; every element of the fictional world is categorized and sorted to hell and back. Each creature belongs to one of fourteen different types. There are three types of magic, (arcane, divine, and primal), and eight schools of spell, and ten different levels of said spells. There are nine alignments, created via the intersection of the three moral categories of good, neutrality, and evil and the three inclinations towards order, law, neutrality, and chaos. There are three families of dragons, and about five species of dragons within each of those three families. On, and on, and on, and on, ad infinitum. It would not be particularly hard for me to find more examples, but I won't allow myself to get sidetracked by my own whinging.

This is a staple of nerd fiction, of course, and while I am on the record as hating it, I understand that for some folks this sort of rigidity in fiction is actually quite pleasing. Fair enough. If you like this sorta thing, great! The rest of this article is going to be me complaining about it, and I probably won't change your mind on the subject, so don't feel the need to stick around and get angry. 

For my own part, I hate diegetic spells and spell schools, I hate alignment, and lord do I hate the three types of dragons. I think that in general the sorting and measuring and labeling of the game works against creating a world that feels full of magic. Dragons could be terrifying apex predators of man and beast, but instead, they're just big color coded reptiles with pretty much exactly the personality you'd expect a [red/green/gold] dragon to have. Magic could feel powerful, scary, and mysterious, but every caster knows the name of your spell and basically what it does, as though D&D wizards are all playing MTG with scryfall open. In a similar way, explicitly labeling any of the actors in your campaign as "good" and "evil" cheapens the moral dimensions of things and dulls any sense of actual benevolence or malevolence. 

This style of worldbuilding is very common because it's both easy to make and understand. We tend to think in terms of discreet categories because we are pattern seeking and nuance and texture is hard. Or, more specifically, blurry lines are hard. Most people think about animals as being amphibians, birds, bugs, fish, mammals, and reptiles, for example, because even if they know that the categories are man made, and fish aren't real, and birds are just reptiles, it can be hard to hold all of the nuance around these taxons in your head, and you usually don't need to. The difference here, is that in fiction, so often that blurriness doesn't exist. The categories of D&D are not like our world's natural hierarchies and family trees, because those systems are lines we have imposed on a pre-existing world, whereas the categories of D&D are baked into the game from the get go. There's no bleed, there's just boxes. To make matters worse, the lines are like, really shitty and boring, man. 

For example, a lot of D&D taxonomy is overly concerned with balance and parity, so the fiction gets predictably bland in another way. If everything rhymes, you don't have to guess how things are going to end, it just sorta falls on your plate like slop.  The three supertypes of dragon each correspond to good, neutrality, and evil, just as the three types of fiends correspond to the evil takes on law, neutrality, and chaos, wouldn't want any alignment to feel left out! We have the Feywild, which is colorful and zany, so now we need the Shadowfell, which is dark and scary. If underground elf, why not underground gnome? It's needless box checking that leads to uninspired fiction. 

Now, I’m not proposing anything in D&D needs to be as messy and lopsided as real world evolutionary trees, but I am encouraging you to color outside the lines you create in your world, and, when possible, maybe just throw those lines out the window. Does your wizard knowing that Fireball is a third level evocation spell improve your experience? No? Throw that shit out! I tell all of my players that spell schools are fake and essentially an out of character way. Do “demon” and “devil” need to be words with strong definitions? I’m pretty sure in my setting (at the time of writing) they’re just whatever weird creatures villagers are afraid of. Yugoloths, on the other hand, suck hard, and as such do not get a place in my setting. When you must categorize, try to unbalance things, make your fiction asymmetrical. The classical four elements are way too pretty. Have you seen the periodic table? That shit is ugly as hell. Through some combination of blurred reality and lopsided systems, your world might start to feel a bit more free. 

Tangent: Screw Vampires

I have this bone to pick with the way D&D writes monster lore. Similar to this but sorta unrelated. I don't know what you'd call this. Naturalization? Overwriting? It's where a writer will concretely state a list of definitive things about a monster like they're a real animal, and there's a whole bunch of them out there somewhere. Like, manticores act like this, and they eat that, and they breed like this, blah blah blah. I'm not totally against some of this but I do think you can strip some of the magic from your monsters if you just make them scary animals. More and more I favor the idea that magical beasts are unique and in 99% of cases, probably can't reproduce super effectively. For a while, it was very frustrating to me that I couldn't find an underlying logic that every single werewolf in my world could work under, before realizing there's no reason lycanthropy had to be a defined or consistent thing. Werewolves are lots of things now.  I think there's probably more to say on this one, but it's still percolating. Will think about this later. In any case, I think I would prefer if most monster books had like, at most 10 words of lore (half of which could always just be "these motherf***ers are bad news").