Illithid - History

History

The origins of the illithids are often shrouded in mystery, with conflicting stories offered in various D&D products, in past editions and in the current version of the game. These different versions can be taken as successive retcons or simply different stories hiding the true nature of the illithids, which may be something else entirely.

The 3.5 Edition D&D supplement Lords of Madness provides that the Illithid were a star-faring people who existed at the end of time. Facing annihilation, the Illithid traveled to the past, arriving roughly 2000 years before the present in any given D&D campaign.

The 2nd Edition book The Illithiad suggests they may be from the Far Realm, an incomprehensible plane completely alien to the known multiverse. There is no mention of time travel in this theory. Instead, they emerged somewhere countless thousands of years ago, beyond the histories of many mortal races, and spread from one world to another, and another, and so on. It is explicitly stated in this book that the illithids appear in some of the most ancient histories of the most ancient races, even those that have no mention of other races.

The 4th Edition preview Wizards Presents Worlds and Monsters supports the claim that mind flayers originate from the Far Realm.

In these two differing versions of the story, much of the variance hinges upon a fictional text called The Sargonne Prophecies. The Illithiad described the Prophecies as misnamed, and that much of it sounds more like ancient myth than prophecy. Lords of Madness takes the name more literally, and states that The Sargonne Prophecies are in fact prophecy — or, perhaps more accurately, a history of the future.

Yet another version came from The Astromundi Cluster, a Spelljammer boxed set produced before The Illithiad. This version holds that the illithids are descended from the outcasts of an ancient human society that ruled the now-shattered world called Astromundi. The outcast humans eventually mutated, deep underground, into the mind flayers. (This boxed set also introduced the entity known as Lugribossk, who was depicted as a god of the Astromundi flayers then, but was later retconned into a proxy of the god Ilsensine.) In the retconned history of the illithids found in either The Illithiad or Lords of Madness, the emergence of illithids in Astromundi becomes a freak occurrence due to the intervention of Ilsensine through its proxy, since the illithids of Astromundi have their own histories as emerging solely upon that world.

However and whenever it occurred, when the illithids arrived in the Material Plane of the far past, they immediately began to build an empire by enslaving many sentient creatures. They were very successful, and soon their worlds-spanning empire became the largest one the multiverse had ever seen. They had the power — in terms of psychic potency and the manpower of countless slaves — to fashion artificial worlds. One such world was this empire's capital, called Penumbra, a diskworld built around a star, which was a thousand years in the making. Such was their might that the Blood War paused as the demons and devils considered a truce to deal with the illithid empire.

Eventually, the primary slave race of the illithids developed resistance to the mental powers of their masters, and revolted. Led by the warrior Gith, the rebellion spread to all the illithids' worlds, and the empire collapsed. The illithid race itself seemed doomed.

Fortunately for the illithids, Gith was betrayed by one of her own generals, Zerthimon, who believed she had grown tyrannical and over-aggressive. Civil war erupted, and the race factionalised into the githyanki and the githzerai (and in the Spelljammer campaign setting the Pirates of Gith). This disruption allowed the illithids to retreat to underground strongholds where they still dwell.

Dungeon #100 claims the original home of the gith forerunners was a world known as Pharagos. Currently it is described as, "an unremarkable Material-Plane world, a far cry from the hotbed of magical activity and divine intervention that is the Forgotten Realms campaign or the World of Greyhawk." Beneath the Wasting Desert on that world, however, is the petrified corpse of the long-dead patron deity of the ancestors of the gith races. As is recounted in most 1st and 2nd edition sources, the ancestors of the gith forerunners were a human civilization before being modified by countless generations of illithid breeding and profane science.

The background material of the Chainmail game places the gith forerunners in a subterranean empire called Zarum in Western Oerik, where they dominated many other races from their capital city of Anithor. These gith seem to have been divided into a rigid caste system, their lives ruled by ancient ritual. The ruins of Zarum overflow with sacred spaces and temples, though the names of the ancient gith gods are unknown today. The period of Zarum's height is not entirely clear, but grey elf sages speculate it was approximately 2,000 years before the Demon Wars that ravaged Western Oerik, or 3,000 years before the present.

At some point, the illithids invaded Zarum from a neighboring plane of existence. Though the gith fought fiercely, they were no match for the psionic might of the mind flayers, and soon they were enslaved. The River of Angry Souls is a remnant of one of the terrible battles between the illithids and the soon-to-be enslaved gith. Many were brought to the Outer Planes and elsewhere to serve as illithid slaves. Other cities in Zarum were transformed into work pits where illithid overseers forced their slaves to toil for countless generations.

After Gith's rebellion, she led her people to the Astral Plane. While a few subject races and surviving illithids remained on Oerth, the gith forerunners have departed the world, seemingly for good. If they retain any interest in the ruins of Zarum, it is well concealed. A portion of the ruins of Anithor were eventually colonized by the drow of House Kilsek, who named their new settlement Kalan-G'eld.