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").

The Joy and Pain of Loving Fortnite in 2026

So I have this guilty pleasure.

Yes, I am an avid Fortnite player, usually for like, a quarter at a time. Zero Build, of course, I'm not a monster. What can I say? I think the game can be pretty fun. Despite the childish associations it's often a pretty good time for me and my friends. And y'know? Some of the most fun stuff out there is made for children, so like, who cares, really. My time with Fortnite is typically very enjoyable, and it's almost never an especially stressful game, even if I'm losing. It's pretty harmless fun, and every so often the game devs will whip up some cool new twist on a season that makes playing feel fresh and exciting. As of the time of writing, they have a system in place that allows you to track down a randomly selected player/squad within a certain radius of yourself, which does a nice job of speeding up engagement. Good stuff.

Recently though, I've been having this problem with the game. It's not actually a new problem, and whenever it rears its head, it usually means my Fortnite craze dies down and I fall back into my normal video game habits. Which is to say Minecraft. Jesus writing this makes me feel like I'm 10 years old. Anyways, my issue is this. Crossovers.

This might sound strange to you, since for most of its lifetime at this point, Fortnite has been the crossover game. In fact, its first ever crossover event happened in 2018, just eight months after the game's release. This collaboration with Marvel Entertainment in the lead up to Infinity War set the tone for a lot of what was to come in the future, and now the idea of Fortnite without crossovers feels ridiculous. And I won't deny, they're fun! But they also suuuuuuuuuuuuck.

The central issue I have with Fortnite crossovers is the way that they absolutely infect a season. Basically every time I play, things will be going normally for a while, and I'll have a decent opportunity to enjoy my time with the game, until the season reaches its later stages, at which point I am playing Collab Fortnite. It doesn't matter what the collab is, because it usually turns out the same. Currently it's Overwatch, but in my playtime I've also had to sit through Avatar the Last Airbender, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Star Wars, and DC Comics collaborations. 

It kinda doesn't matter what the collab is, they tend to play out the same. Some new thematically appropriate items are added to the loot pool. They're often very good, and so the gameplay shifts from being mostly gunplay based to fighting with these weird collab weapons, which often have some sort of crazy movement ability to go along with their pushed stats. This means that final fights revolve heavily around a very frenetic and hard to follow run-and-gun style gameplay where I am at a massive disadvantage because my computer is slow and I can't keep track of all the Jujutsu Kaisen characters flying across my screen. Game states are just too damn difficult to track. I don't really enjoy this style of gameplay, even when I win, there's something that feels very hollow about it. The crossover items feel like gimicky skinner boxes, designed to get all of the dopamine receptors in your brain firing at max capacity. Consequently this means that while they are fun momentarily, they start to suck very bad with continued usage as your brain gets wise to the trickery at play, hidden behind flashy movement and VFX. 

Now, less offensive but maybe a bit more crass feeling are the purely cosmetic crossovers, and there's just so many of them that it's really easy to lose track. They're funny some percentage of the time (I am often rocking a Sabrina Carpenter skin) but the joke wears thin with constant repetition, and they can be very distracting. When the joke is funny, it's super funny, like seeing Ben Ten rise from behind the mountain like a Greek god, fists ablaze with light and holy fury, raining down shotgun shells like thunder bolts from Olympus. More often than not though, it just sorta feels dumb. Now, Fortnite is certainly eclectic even without these skins but typically their in house creations share a certain artistic style that makes them feel a bit more sympatico with one another. This makes them much more easy to comprehend. Once again, I'm not totally against these cosmetic crossovers, it just feels like Fortnite has knocked the cookie jar off the top shelf and is gorging itself past the point of joy or benefit. 

Recently though I've been thinking, and I feel like it's pretty clear that the crossover events are emblematic of a deeper problem in Fortnite. Like, in this current season, half of the items I hate aren't even crossover items, they're just normal fortnite loot. They have the exact same problems as described above! The overdrive rifle and the seven gauntlets come to mind as being just deeply uninteresting to me, and the overdrive rifle isn't even new to this season. This sickness does not come from outside of the game, but from within. And really, I should've known that shouldn't I? 

Fortnite is, first and foremost, a commercial product. It pretty much always has been. That's not to say the devs or the teams working on it have no love for the project, I am sure they do, and I'm sure they do their best to make it as good as possible. But Fortnite has always been ruled by something more crude than love. Part of me feels like it must've been better once, maybe in the few months that I played the game with my father back in 2017, before it was seized by all of the things I can't stand. I'm skeptical though. I'm not writing this because I think anything will change, even though I want it to, I guess I'm just sorta disappointed that financial interests are so tightly wound against this thing I like. 

I guess what I'm trying to say is that while Fortnite has lost its chance at having its own identity, the game was always pretty financially scummy, and that sucks. Even so, while there may not have been much art in the previous version of the game, there was at least something, and the loss of that something is a bit sad to think about. I don't know, I'm not really all that worked up about it. It's the way the game is, and I can still love it, even if sometimes the way it's designed means I'm going to hate it. Such is life.

Hey what the fuck's up with all these Magic cards?

Chainlink #7: Mind Flayers

Among D&D's stable of original monsters, there are few I'm more fond of than mind flayers*. Here's a take on them. Not a revolutionary one, but hopefully interesting enough to get me excited enough to run with them as a campaign frame.

It should be noted, none of this is cannon to Coris, which is my principle setting, and the one that most of my writing on this blog centers on (save for the previous two chainlink posts, which are for something else I think). Or at least, they're not for this current version of my setting. When I go through and make Coris Continuity II, where the Gods probably don't exist and the Celestial Empire that nearly doomed the world were a bunch of space alien elves, I might throw in some squid men for variety's sake. Maybe that's when the Meyasoa will finally be canon as well. Who knows. Anyways, on to the boring prehistory stuff.

The Boring Prehistory.

Art by Wayne Reynolds

There was a time where every star in the sky was theirs. The long arm of their ancient empire reached endlessly across time and space to grasp at worlds unknown, to know them, to take from them their treasure, to feast. To them, other life in the galaxy could be nothing more than cattle or sheep dogs, beasts born for slaughter, or for servitude. They were not cold and emotionless, at least not totally. They didn't have much love, but they had art, philosophy, ideals, maybe even religion, in some alien sense. At this time, there was no hatred in their actions, everything in the universe was simply beneath hate. Their evil was mundane, banal, uncaring. Nobody hates the sheep for giving up its meat, they simply don't think of it.

They were masters of psionics, a power born of the mind, with the ability to shape the body. Most of their technology was founded on their own psionic abilities in conjunction with bio-engineering, a craft they had essentially mastered. Their ships, their computers, their fighting machines, all of these things were grown. Sometimes these were creatures of their own creation, often they were things the illithids discovered and molded into a desired shape. 

They fell the way any great empire falls, it was a slow and painful demise, death by a thousand cuts. A military defeat here, several bloody revolts there, a dash of bureaucratic breakdown, a pinch of infighting. If you were to ask them, though, the end came with one final act of revolt at the hands of a species only recently enslaved. A rebel leader arose with enough tactical wit and political clout to form an alliance, which struck at the heart of the already dying empire. Their perfect world died when the rebellion kicked down the doors of the royal palace and took the head of the Eternal Emperor, the bedrock which their empire rested upon. In but a moment, their world died. 

There were pockets of resistance out there for some time, but they all began to break down due to a lack of sustainable food sources, infighting, and pressure from newly forming alliances. The only place where they managed to establish a foothold worth anything is here, wherever that is. To them, our world is the ultimate galactic backwater, an undeveloped, pre-industrial piece of shit,  ruled over beings no more intelligent than cattle. Even so, with their numbers so diminished, their technology broken or breaking, their leaders dead and gone, any attempt at an overt, hostile takeover of our planet would be suicidal. Even if they should succeed against our world's meager technology and power rooted in superstition, hose who finally felled their empire still patrol the stars, searching for any sign that their work is not yet done. 

This infuriates them. If you should meet one, know that this fury is all they have left in their hearts, a ferocious, undying anger towards anything other than them. They will have sophisticated, self-deluding  justifications for everything they do to you, every act of torture, every cruel experiment, every brain sucked out of its skull, but in their hearts, their anger is the only justification they need. Their small clutches of society are dominated by this anger, by a need to put things right again, to restore themselves to glory, to punish their enemies for rebelling and to punish us for merely existing. When you know how they live, it's easy to see why they are so angry indeed.

Invasion

Now, they've become very good at hiding, with most taking to the world's subterranean depths. Some live aboard the last of their great ships, if their cloaking technology still works, floating along in the planet's upper atmosphere, descending only to feed. Others live within the seas, dwelling off the coast in camouflaged glass domes. Wherever they live, it's usually close to humans, because our brains are the only decent food on this planet. They try to be subtle, preying on only the easiest of targets, but even this will cause attention eventually. Much of their scientific work is dedicated to easing this tension by creating artificial brains, their most recent attempt, which has been successful enough to spread amongst most of the known colonies, involved the creation of a new creature, created from simian DNA. They're not especially intelligent, which poses a problem for the mind flayers. It makes meals dull, uninteresting, flavorless. Still, it's better than discovery, so human brains are a rare delicacy, eaten in celebration.

The other reason they live near humans is because they need manpower. In the grand scheme of things, humans aren't the most desirable servants, but we stick around primarily because their limited genetic fabrication processes do not allow for the easy cultivation of psionic talent. That's something they have to find, and fortunately for them, latent psionic ability is decently common in human life, about found in maybe 5% of the population. Every illithid is psionic, of course, but given there are so few of them, they're better off recruiting and awakening humans (brainwashing and torturing these latent psionics until they have a massive seizure and their powers awaken). Human thralls may serve as guards, hunters, assassins, spies, and laborers, depending on their abilities, which vary from the spectacular, to the pathetic, to the grotesque. If they are exceptionally powerful and the brainwashing and awakening haven't totally fried their brains, they might even be allowed to serve as technicians. 

When the Emperor died, this didn't just represent the head of the state being eliminated, but essentially a universal collapse in long range communication for the illithid empire. The Emperor was less of a ruler and more of a gestalt consciousness of minds, broadcasting a psychic signal that interfaced with all illithid technology, allowing for easy and near instant psionic communication between the most disparate reaches of the empire. The Emperor's minds also dictated much of the empire's actions, with a cold, emotionless sort of logic, coordinating its actions like some sort of galaxy spanning brain. In its absence, flayers have had to adapt, and many are attempting to replicate the role of the Emperor with psionic fulcrums of their own design. Such creations take the form of massive brains, the first of which were allegedly seeded from bits of the Eternal Emperor's very own grey matter. These brains are large enough they need supportive scaffolding as to not collapse under their own weight. They're effectively very powerful supercomputers, able to perform thousands of complex calculations in mere seconds, broadcast psionic signals across countries, and coordinate between one another. Their maintenance is of utmost importance to a colony, who tend to them fervently, with a sort of religious devotion. Thralls gently scrub away any dirt or grime that collects on their bulk, moisten them with fluid, and prune any tumorous growths that are skewing calculations. Technicians attune to the brains psionically, reading their output and feeding them fresh data, while monitoring their output to make sure it seems consistent with reality. 

These brain computers would be incredible if not for the fact that they all tend to be mildly sapient and in possession of a conscious will. Unlike the supposedly dispassionate, analytical Emperor, they have obsessions, fears, desires, and grudges. This fact makes them unpredictable at times, and if not properly cared for, they may even attempt to enthrall their entire colony for their own usage. Leadership in any given colony is split somewhat haphazardly between these machines and a handful of mind flayers, and at any moment, a brutal power struggle could emerge between the two. If the computers weren't essential for coordination between and within colonies, it would be easy to leave the technology behind, but so far nobody's found a better alternative, and so they remain.

Growing Pains

This is true of much of what the illithids do. A colony is full of half measures and band-aids, solutions are often simply tourniquets wrapped around a bleeding stump, hastily tied to afford the colony just a little more time. Their reliance on unclean and chaotic biological technology, as well as unpredictable and, by comparison, ineffectual human psionics, is utterly infuriating for them. They are constantly searching for ways to return to their former levels of heightened psionic technology, and constantly failing. Most illithids are old enough to remember the twilight years of their empire, and are consequently filled with fury when they contemplate how far they have fallen. Younger illithids are a rarity, for producing them is perhaps the most frustrating thing of all, for those who remember how easy child rearing once was.

Illithid spawn are small, voracious tadpoles, that look something like tiny squid. They spend the early days of their life suspended in shallow pools of brine, where they drift aimlessly, eating any biological material they come into contact with. Once they're large enough (about the size of your index finger), they're plucked from their pool, and inserted into a suitable host. They will move towards the host's skull, devour most of its brain, before connecting their nervous system with that of the host body, wiring directly into their brain stem. At this point, they fill the entire cranial cavity of the host, and will begin to slowly make changes to their claimed body. They remove and eat the eyes, protruding a set of temporary sensory organs through the empty lids, these can sense light, but can't see very well. Their other tentacles pass through the body's mouth. This is what they will look like for a few months, though their body will quickly begin to change as the growing illithid secretes a set of appropriating hormones. The body's skin will shed, revealing a new, oily purple layer of the epidermis. The skull will soften, giving way to the squid's head, now finally fit with proper eyes. Their brain is soaking up knowledge like a sponge at this point in time, especially from other mature mind flayers, from whom it may inherit some basic personality traits and short memories. At this point, it's ready to go to work

The process is unwieldy, even at the best of times. In the days of the empire, there was a species of host bodies grown by illithids, to smooth the whole process out. You can tell if an illithid was born before the fall if they only have four fingers, a telltale sign that one of these host bodies was used to usher them into the world. The host brains were theoretically functional, but each body was functionally not alive, they lacked any sort of subjectivity. Now, without these bodies, illithids must be implanted into humans, who do have such subjectivity. This makes things messy, because newborn illithids will inherit some of their memories or quirks, which makes them particularly unruly. The vast majority of these new converts are still illithids at heart, they have the same deep seated hatred for our kind, but their nostalgia for the empire is foggier, and sometimes nonexistent. This has lead to a deep generational divide in their societies, yet another conflict bubbling beneath the surface, ready to boil over at any point in time.

The Plan

Even amidst their lack of coordination, their limited resources, and their unwinnable situation, they continue to plan. There is no unified goal amongst illithid colonies, indeed they often hate one another nearly as much as they hate us, but something of a doctrine has emerged over the years.

They are dedicated to secrecy above all. None can know they exist, that they move against the world in the shadows. Any action that would expose their existence is tantamount to suicide. If a colony intends to throw off their cowl, to break the masquerade, they will be dealt with swiftly. Any humans who witness an illithid are likewise dispatched with extreme prejudice. There can be no possibility of discovery.

Many of their dreams of world domination are stifled by a lack of technology and manpower, so they continue to work. Every colony is trying its best to advance its technology as quickly as possible. As said above, they often fail, but breakthroughs are being made every year. There is a slow, definite creep forward amongst the most prominent groups. 

Of course, if overt domination is a no go, that makes something more covert a rather attractive option. The most ordinary seeming of thralls become spies, living in human society, carrying about their daily tasks as normal. Many are installed in positions with proximity to power. Through these means they have learned much of our world's culture, our art, philosophy, ideals, religions. They have learned how deeply we can hate one another, and conversely, how deeply we love as well. 

They despise us all the same. Every new drop of information is read through eyes clouded by venom, poured over and examined with the same disgust one might regard a particularly unusual insect with. Each new fact about us is more kindling to stoke the cold fire in their hearts, to steel their resolve and push them to new heights of depraved cruelty. At night, when their brain activity drops into what could only barely be called sleep, I suppose they dream of the day in which they can cast off the shadows settled like a cloak about their existence and scour this world of our presence. I suppose they wake up grief stricken at this fantasy's current impossibility. I suppose, it is possible they spend some mornings weeping, if they are capable of such a thing. Only our destruction can make them whole, only our sorrow will bring them joy. One day their dream will be realized, maybe one day soon. Until that day comes, they will work ceaselessly to bring it about, so they continue to work in the darkness. For now.

*Gelatinous Motherfucking Cubes, baby. 

Hobgoblinization: A Dubiously Canonical Exploration

In the most recent version of my setting, I've been moving towards a model where the different fantasy peoples of the world are more like separate species from one another, that is, they probably can't make babies due to divergent or entirely separate evolutionary history and genetics. The gods are only dubiously real, and everything you can play as either evolved biologically or was created via magic by someone a bit later down the line (ie beastfolk). The three big groups in my mind are humans (we're basically the same), elves (they're weird and mostly extinct space aliens), and orcs/goblins, who oscillate between being a very bespoke sort of beastfolk, some sort of alternate branch of primate evolution that also yielded intelligence, or creatures from an alternate dimension who've been stranded on Coris for a few thousand years. I can't decide which one I like better, though I think the first and third options are probably more believable, since they make more sense as to why they haven't outcompeted humans or vice versa. Whatever the case, I want them to feel a bit weird biologically speaking, so here's an idea I'm tossing out to see how it feels in my mouth.

Goblins have a larval tadpole stage like frogs. They are born in clutches of a few dozen, deposited into a local pond where they will eat and be eaten, until few are left, perhaps 5 or 6. Once they're nice and docile, around when their sharp teeth fall out and their "social" teeth grow in, they'll be taken back into the house and reared as standard citizens. The normal ailments that affect human children still weigh on these baby goblins, so it's very possible only one will live to see adulthood. Hobgoblins, which humans erroneously think of as a separate subspecies of goblins, are merely the goblin aristocracy, who have learned to take advantage of this process.

To make a hobgoblin, you need three things: food, warmth, and high humidity. For most, the mundane realities of life make this difficult; goblins live in the Northern reaches of Lakarta where the weather is cold, and for most food is a bit scarce. Those who can make hobgoblins are the aristocracy of the goblin world, able to afford these things with ease. Here's what they do. First, they construct a large subterranean chamber, dig out a pool, and fill the room with heated water.  When the clutch of baby goblins are welcomed into the world, a select few are hand picked by parents, typically the largest or healthiest looking. The other tadpoles will be fed to these heirs, who will also be fed on a rich diet, mostly meat, while spending their time lounging around in their warm, muggy basement chambers. They will grow exceptionally plump when fed with a steady supply of food. Fat little amphibians, cooing happily as they soak in their muggy ponds, exceptionally cute, but for the chicken blood staining their lips. After a few months, their time in the pond will end, and they will begin to grow prodigiously. A hobgoblin child is quite large compared to a goblin child, and that difference will continue into adulthood. Hobgoblins are typically around 6 feet tall, whereas goblins sit more in the 3-4 foot range. Nearly every old money aristocrat you meet will be a hobgoblin, to usher one's progeny into the world in such a way is seen as a beautiful, honorable thing.

This process happens because young goblins have a genetic switch that fires off when they're in a resource rich environment. Their body detects the glut of food, the luxurious temperature, and the rich atmosphere, and begins increasing their hunger signals and pumping out growth hormones. The original home of the goblins was a tempestuous place, where the environment could theoretically change on a dime, so they evolved to take advantage of good times with they could, growing at a rapid pace. This happens to older goblins too, but the effects are lessened, typically they'll only gain an inch or two. Ogre-making takes advantage of this process. A baby goblin is selected, much as one is in a hobgoblin clutch, and fed consistently for months, while their growth hormones are augmented with transmutation magic, turning them into veritable behemoths.

Yeah, I think that's too weird for my tastes. I'll file it away for some other project.