This is the first in a series of articles detailing the creation of an AD&D campaign centered around a monstrous battle against the Illithid. The campaign has since been finished, so now I'm updating this website, with the results. I do recommend TSR's The Illithiad as an excellent source of ideas to expand upon. They concentrated more on the psionic aspects of the Illithid, whereas I took a much different initial approach. Unfortunately for me, The Illithiad came out far too late for me to use anything other than a tiny bit of its information.
I came up with this campaign idea as an outgrowth of Avamor's history and creation. It also meshed neatly with my desire to eliminate psionics entirely from the campaign as being far too problematic in combination with magic, provide a nice long period of peace and stability to the world so I could work major changes in the setting "off stage", and then introduce a new set of characters into the mix for more fun. Events from previous campaigns - the death of Garrod selDraco, the rise of Hazuer, the blinding of and eventual sight restoration of Dragonmage Khasil, the restoration of King Vendariel II to the throne of Ralkstag, and others - helped create one of the more interesting campaigns I've had the privelege to run.
Some day, perhaps, I'll publish the story, or perhaps a former player will make that contribution. But for now, my DM notes will have to do. I will say that I learned a lot more about DMing from this campaign - what to do, how to do it, and what not to do. I've made the effort to update my website with this advice so that other DMs and Players won't have to go through it the hard way! Like most of the material on Guardian's AD&D Website, this document will continue to change and grow for quite some time. The changes will come slower and slower as I get more and more of the information collected in one place, and as I go through my now massive filing cabinets and get them sorted out.
To start, we have to go back a looong ways in Avamor's history, almost to the very creation of the world. In this bygone age, there were only two sentient races on the world: Dragon and Unicorn. Both are natural enemies, and both are immortal - immortal in the sense that they do not die from old age.
Then came the arrival of the Tae-esh-naree, a powerful, ancient race well-practiced in magical and scientific arts. Their crystalline citadel arrived in orbit around Avamor damaged and breaking apart from the stresses of its travel from another Prime Material Plane. The Tae-esh-naree quickly abandoned their dying fortress, taking with them only what they could easily carry, along with their slaves - the Duanan and Tatheari. Their citadel broke apart, destroyed to the point where it became a ring of glass-like dust around Avamor, lit by its moons.
The Tae-esh-naree's homeworld had been invaded by the Illithid, and finally succumbed to their predations. Its sun darkened, the surface completely subsumed by the rapacious mind flayer ecology, the remaining Tae-esh-naree used their considerable power to flee, arriving on Avamor much more by accident than design.
Here, they found a world untouched by the Illithid. Indeed, their early tests showed that the nature of life on Avamor was surprisingly resistant, even inimical, to their ancient enemy. Even so, the Tae-esh-naree well knew the adaptable nature of the Illithid, and they feared the possibility that the mind flayers would somehow follow them through the myriad planes to Avamor, where the Tae-esh-naree themselves were greatly weakened. On this young world, the laws of magic and science functioned in a vastly different manner from their home - one of the reasons the unaltered creatures of Avamor have proven so resistant to the virulent Illithid forms of life.
So did the Tae-esh-naree, the Ancients, settle their colonies all over their newfound world. In the time it took the Ancients to adapt to this strange, often hostile, land, their numbers dwindled and conflict among various colonies grew so great that they eventually destroyed themselves in a great Cataclysm. From this destruction, the Draconic race was flung far and wide, shattered into its various subraces. The Alicorns too, suffered greatly - nearly wiped out to the last. By their experimentation on the animals and creatures native to the world were born the races of Man, so similar to the Tae-esh-naree they almost replaced the Duanan and Tatheari as favored slaves; the Aelvenar, Dwaenar, Eloch-kal (Orcs), and still others besides.
Still, a few lost ruins, or remnants of their structures, yet remain. The Blackwood Forest is the most intact of these, save for one or two colonies located in either polar icecap. Details of these places are for another time.
The Tae-esh-naree quite accidentally left a trail for the Illithid to follow. However, the mind flayers were unable to pinpoint which, exactly, of the many alternate Primes their latest victims had fled to. They discerned the general direction, but the specific plane was obscured, somehow hiding itself by its very nature. For millennia, the Illithid searched, haunted by their renegade brethren, the Ildaren. They spread and grew among hundreds of worlds and planes, beginning with slow infiltrations of agents, adapting to the nature of those worlds, finally moving to establish a colony and Elder Brain, before taking over the world and darkening its sun.
Finally, a small group of adventurers entered the demenses of the Blackwood Forest (called Darkenwood back then), and discovered the remains of a Tae-esh-naree colony. They explored it, finding magics and devices beyond their wildest imaginings, including a tower - a museum of sorts - that told in pictures how the Ancients came to this world. Therein, they unknowingly discovered a portion of the great engine that powered the crystal citadel and activated it. This had the effect of "rippling" planar boundaries.
The Illithid, sensitive to movement between planes, recognized this "rippling" all too well. They were quite surprised to discover that one of the worlds they had just begun to infiltrate and learn about was, in fact, the "sanctuary" the Tae-esh-naree had fled to.
They stepped up their plans for conquest accordingly, intending to catch the now extinct Tae-esh-naree completely off-guard.
Here's what I did. I borrowed an idea from David Gerrold's Chtorr books. I treated the Illithid as an ecological invasion. The Illithid Elder Brains are the highest form of life on their homeworld, having evolved a hive-like form of life. The Elder Brain is exactly that - a massive brain, the queen/king of the colony, served by special elite guards - the Illithid themselves, and myriad drones and workers - the Illithid Spawn. The Illithid incorporate other, native lifeforms into their colony, eventually progressing to a point where they create hybrid forms. They take all the desirable traits they can from newly-discovered organisms (a troll's regeneration, for example), and add them to their already impressively adapted Spawn. Thus, early in the campaign, the PCs ran into, or heard about, only those creatures the Illithid had brought with them (the raw breeding stock). Towards the end, they began encountering more and more incorporated hybridized forms (regenerating, fire-resistant trolls led by incorporated beholders). The PCs could tell they were in Illithid-controlled territory whenever they started running across fungal-like, slimy growths covering the ground in patches. Near their home colony, these patches became one vast, acidic, spore-filled swamp - in the middle of the Desert of Dreams (a desert composed primarily of powdered glass - sandstorms were hell).
What my version of the Illithid do is scout a world and learn about it. Then establish an Elder Brain. Then begin capturing native fauna and flora to learn how best to incorporate it. Then begin controlling any key governments or organized centers of civilization. From there, they spread down to control, and eventually incorporate, the most dominant lifeforms until they have consumed the world's ecology and replaced it with their own, adapted, ecology.
On Avamor, the Illithid had a major problem. Those lifeforms unaltered by the Tae-esh-naree (guess where the Ancients learned that trick from) were incredibly resistant to the Illithid's form of biological incorporation. The Illithid would "consume" (sometimes quite literally) a creature, but were unable to learn from or control its biology or reproduce its traits. This was especially true of the higher lifeforms, such as magical creatures. Furthermore, the Illithid's innate psionic abilities were drastically crippled on Avamor. Something about this world continuously drained them of their mental energies. Their first couple of centuries on Avamor were spent overcoming these problems. Even then, they were not completely successful.
Add the fact that the only other time the Illithid had encountered magic was on the Tae-esh-naree homeworld. They mastered that form - usually by incorporating or subsuming its practitioners. Magic on Avamor worked in a vastly different manner, employing ley lines and nodes, or extra-planar sources that the Illithid (with their Tae-esh-naree "inherited" skills) couldn't use. Capturing wizards alive who were powerful enough and knowledgeable enough for the Illithid to use (ie. consume their brains mostly intact so they could retain the knowledge) was nearly impossible. Solitary wizards, with no Guild affiliations, of sufficient power were either singular and paranoid or undead (and of no use). Guild wizards had protections and defenses placed on them by their guilds to keep their secrets from falling into their rivals' hands (death or capture resulting in mind alteration or fiery explosion). And since the Illithid couldn't use their own abilities to penetrate or neutralize these defenses, they had a miserable time at first.
This bought the Forces of Good, and the Forces of Evil, time to begin mobilizing against the Illithid - after they found out about the mind flayers, of course.
In game terms, I replaced many of the Illithid's psionic powers with biologically-engineered abilities. This meant that while they were still a major threat, I also removed the problem of many psionic powers piercing or able to affect magic, but not the reverse (ref. The Complete Psionics Handbook or The Will and the Way). It also helped emphasize how the PCs would use one trick or type of attack against them, and the next time they ran into the mind flayers, their enemies were becoming immune to that particular trick. The Illithid would have eventually conquered the magic problems on their own by a simple process of adaptation and learning. They were eventually able to start snatching magic practitioners. They couldn't subsume priestly abilities, since these were granted by a deity (which confused them to no end - the Tae-esh-naree were as atheistic as you can get, like the Illithid themselves). Part of this process was the Illithid developing the ability to drain off magical energy (priestly magics were immune to this). Since I use a spell point system, I had PC spell slingers pumping 10-40 spell points just to get off a fireball.
I also made the Illithid, their Spawn, and the Elder Brain innately telepathic. This meant that whatever one of them learned, the others learned pretty soon. It made them hideously well-organized in battle. Whenever one of the PCs or NPCs was weakened, or in a bad position, the Illithid could take immediate advantage in almost every case. The PCs soon learned that if they could take out a leading Illithid (who was usually psionically invisible or disguised) in a group of Spawn, the Spawn would be stunned for a couple of rounds and be disorganized afterwards. This was because the Elder Brain gave its orders to the Illithid, who in turn had autonomous local control over the Spawn. Information was gathered from Spawn, to controlling Illithid, to overmind Elder Brain. Kill the Illithid in charge of the Spawn, and it would take several minutes for other nearby Illithid (or the Elder Brain) to establish control over them. This led to the correct conclusion that if someone could kill the Elder Brain that all the Illithid and Spawn would be helpless for at least several minutes (in actuality, for several hours), and very disorganized afterwards (at least, until another Elder Brain could be grown - which would take years at best). The PCs and NPCs also started developing spells to break telepathic links, or at least block them temporarily. Unfortunately for the Good Guys, it took a long time to develop such magics. They weren't employed until the final battle in the Desert of Dreams.
One of the PCs hit on the idea of starting a chemical war with the Illithid. His character had many slots in herbalism and alchemy. So he developed a powder that was deadly poison to the Illithid lifeforms. From this, the PCs learned just how quickly their enemy could adapt. The first few times it was used, the Spawn recipients didn't even get a saving throw. The next time, the Spawn survived for a round or two if they made their save. The time after that, they survived longer. After that, one or two would survive poisoning. At that point, the Elder Brain began analyzing what the poison was composed of and created a kind of slime mold that destroyed those particular plants. However, Zenki (the character in question) published his poison formula to all the PCs' allies (except the Karanukese), and the various leaders began stockpiling the ingredients. (Picture squads of Druids with the Plant Growth spell.) While it wasn't a cure-all, the first version of the anti-Illithid powder did have the nice effect of being completely harmless to anything else but Illithid and their Spawn. It made it easy to test if the Illithid had parasitized someone by having them drink some of the powder mixed with wine.
Towards the end of the War, Zenki developed a second version of the powder which the Illithid were not immune to. Unfortunately, this stuff was lethal to just about anything that even sniffed it. It was used to great effect in the final battles, being dropped from the backs of Dragons over Illithid lines.
This ends the first article of the Illithid War.
Copyright 1998 by Guardian (RemoveThisTextGuardian(at)avamor(dot)net).