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Unveiled Masters: Essential Guide To Mindflayers
Mind Flayers
The very name conjures up images of slaver and overlords; of ravenous beings with an insatiable appetite for the brains of other creatures. Unveiled Masters: The Essential Guide to Mind Flayers describes in great detail the history, biology, society, and culture of the mind flayers, the penultimate fantasy adversary. Being new heights of the challenge to any d20 campaign with these nefarious masterminds.
Unveiled Masters features:
? Details on the Mind Flayer Interplanar Empire that spans the multiverse!
? An exhaustive study into the psychology of heartless predators
? Insidious races specially designed to infiltrate the enemies of the Mind Flayers
? Varian Mind Flayers to further challenge your characters
? Mind Flayer "technology", an assembly of cunningly-wrought psionic and magical devices that permit the Mind Flayers to dominate lesser species
? A complete Mind Flayer pantheon
? Enough new Domains, Feat, Spells, and Psionic powers to rule the multiverse
? New Prestige Classes for Mind Flayers
? Adventure seeds and campaign hooks galore!
The very name conjures up images of slaver and overlords; of ravenous beings with an insatiable appetite for the brains of other creatures. Unveiled Masters: The Essential Guide to Mind Flayers describes in great detail the history, biology, society, and culture of the mind flayers, the penultimate fantasy adversary. Being new heights of the challenge to any d20 campaign with these nefarious masterminds.
Unveiled Masters features:
? Details on the Mind Flayer Interplanar Empire that spans the multiverse!
? An exhaustive study into the psychology of heartless predators
? Insidious races specially designed to infiltrate the enemies of the Mind Flayers
? Varian Mind Flayers to further challenge your characters
? Mind Flayer "technology", an assembly of cunningly-wrought psionic and magical devices that permit the Mind Flayers to dominate lesser species
? A complete Mind Flayer pantheon
? Enough new Domains, Feat, Spells, and Psionic powers to rule the multiverse
? New Prestige Classes for Mind Flayers
? Adventure seeds and campaign hooks galore!
112 pages, Paperback
Published January 1, 2002
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November 30, 2017
Mind flayers are one of the best monsters in Dungeons and Dragons. Octopus-headed psychics who eat brains, live underground, and inexplicably all wear high-collared robes? What's not to like! It's why I read Lords of Madness, after all. And I had heard that Unveiled Masters was one of the better books about them, and the people who said that were right.
As much as I like Lords of Madness's explanation for the mind flayers--that they're time travelers, and possibly post-humans, from the end of the multiverse who hurled themselves into the past to avoid some horrific catastrophe--Unveiled Masters has a good one too. The "illeth" (go away, copyright lawyers!) are survivors of a previous iteration of the multiverse, created by a being called "Ftaghn." Not long after their creation, they discovered the secret of planar gateways, allowing transit for large forces over vast distances, and with that they forged an empire of darkness and slavery over a thousand worlds. Their flesh shapers warped life to suit their needs, and their mind flayers conditioned others as slaves, and they ruled supreme and perfect. At the height of their power, they even went to war against the Outer Planes, trying to conquer the gods. But eventually, a rebellion sparked by "Gidh" spread from world to world, and that brought about civil war. One group of illeth, concerned about their opponents' ability to move goods and troops through the gate network, shut it down. Without the gates to connect them and with constant slave rebellions, the Illeth Empire fell apart into small polities or individual cities, leading to the modern mind flayer infestation on many worlds. The mind flayers remember their Great Work, though--the mission to conquer the universe and bring their inner perfection to a chaotic and unstable external world--and plot to regain their empire.
This is pretty good. It offers a potential explanation for what links aberrations together as a creature type; they were created by the ancient illeth flesh shapers. It offers plenty of ancient mind flayer ruins for adventurers to dig up and provides motivation for why the mind flayers are always plotting to extinguish the sun and conquer the world--because they believe they are perfect. Unfortunately, the expression of that perfection is hindered by an imperfect universe, and only by obtaining total control over the multiverse can the illeth truly come into their perfection. This also explains why the mind flayers love psionics so much. As a power source that comes from within, it is closer to the illeth's own perfection than magic, which relies on external power and is thus tainted by the flaws of the universe.
Half of the book is about the illeth's philosophy and approaches toward the multiverse (unrelenting hostility and condescension). The other half is rules and the powers of the illeth, which I'm less qualified to judge since I don't have an amazing grasp of the rules of D&D 3.X, but I can at least comment on them. I did like the elegance of saying that the aboleth are a species of illeth who modified themselves for underwater living. It make sense, since they both have psychic powers, they both have tentacles, and they both keep slaves. And I really like the kraketh, even though it's kind of silly. The image of a giant-squid-sized mind flayer head swimming through the oceans and crushing ships is too good to pass up.
There's plenty of spells and psychic powers in here, mostly focused on enslaving other beings, seizing or destroying knowledge, or creating gribbly tentacles, and a few examples of illeth technology. I was especially fond of the varieties of powered armor which were living creatures that the illeth climbed into and controlled. It's appropriately creepy and atmospheric, while also providing a question to adventuring parties who somehow get their hands on them as loot--do they really want to try to use living armor created by the mind flayers, which might be intelligent in its own right or have psychic powers? After a while, who would really be in control?
The book ends with prestige classes like the Mind Eater, the Skull Collector, and the Master of Flesh, plus a few examples of illeth-focused campaigns and a sample pantheon for people who want to remove the illeth's hatred of the gods and replace it with devotion to horrible beings from the darkness between the stars. It's all wonderfully atmospheric and makes me want to run a game with mind flayers in it right away, and the only reason I'm not giving Unveiled Masters five stars is that I have no basis for evaluating its mechanical soundness. More games other than D&D and Final Fantasy need mind flayers in them.
As much as I like Lords of Madness's explanation for the mind flayers--that they're time travelers, and possibly post-humans, from the end of the multiverse who hurled themselves into the past to avoid some horrific catastrophe--Unveiled Masters has a good one too. The "illeth" (go away, copyright lawyers!) are survivors of a previous iteration of the multiverse, created by a being called "Ftaghn." Not long after their creation, they discovered the secret of planar gateways, allowing transit for large forces over vast distances, and with that they forged an empire of darkness and slavery over a thousand worlds. Their flesh shapers warped life to suit their needs, and their mind flayers conditioned others as slaves, and they ruled supreme and perfect. At the height of their power, they even went to war against the Outer Planes, trying to conquer the gods. But eventually, a rebellion sparked by "Gidh" spread from world to world, and that brought about civil war. One group of illeth, concerned about their opponents' ability to move goods and troops through the gate network, shut it down. Without the gates to connect them and with constant slave rebellions, the Illeth Empire fell apart into small polities or individual cities, leading to the modern mind flayer infestation on many worlds. The mind flayers remember their Great Work, though--the mission to conquer the universe and bring their inner perfection to a chaotic and unstable external world--and plot to regain their empire.
This is pretty good. It offers a potential explanation for what links aberrations together as a creature type; they were created by the ancient illeth flesh shapers. It offers plenty of ancient mind flayer ruins for adventurers to dig up and provides motivation for why the mind flayers are always plotting to extinguish the sun and conquer the world--because they believe they are perfect. Unfortunately, the expression of that perfection is hindered by an imperfect universe, and only by obtaining total control over the multiverse can the illeth truly come into their perfection. This also explains why the mind flayers love psionics so much. As a power source that comes from within, it is closer to the illeth's own perfection than magic, which relies on external power and is thus tainted by the flaws of the universe.
Half of the book is about the illeth's philosophy and approaches toward the multiverse (unrelenting hostility and condescension). The other half is rules and the powers of the illeth, which I'm less qualified to judge since I don't have an amazing grasp of the rules of D&D 3.X, but I can at least comment on them. I did like the elegance of saying that the aboleth are a species of illeth who modified themselves for underwater living. It make sense, since they both have psychic powers, they both have tentacles, and they both keep slaves. And I really like the kraketh, even though it's kind of silly. The image of a giant-squid-sized mind flayer head swimming through the oceans and crushing ships is too good to pass up.
There's plenty of spells and psychic powers in here, mostly focused on enslaving other beings, seizing or destroying knowledge, or creating gribbly tentacles, and a few examples of illeth technology. I was especially fond of the varieties of powered armor which were living creatures that the illeth climbed into and controlled. It's appropriately creepy and atmospheric, while also providing a question to adventuring parties who somehow get their hands on them as loot--do they really want to try to use living armor created by the mind flayers, which might be intelligent in its own right or have psychic powers? After a while, who would really be in control?
The book ends with prestige classes like the Mind Eater, the Skull Collector, and the Master of Flesh, plus a few examples of illeth-focused campaigns and a sample pantheon for people who want to remove the illeth's hatred of the gods and replace it with devotion to horrible beings from the darkness between the stars. It's all wonderfully atmospheric and makes me want to run a game with mind flayers in it right away, and the only reason I'm not giving Unveiled Masters five stars is that I have no basis for evaluating its mechanical soundness. More games other than D&D and Final Fantasy need mind flayers in them.
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