I’m really sorry Nucklavee, you missed out again, 6 votes to 8. One day you’ll get your chance, you weird skin-weilding beastie.
Illithids, commonly called Mind Flayers, are a common and notorious foe in Dungeons & Dragons. They make an excellent BBEG (Big Bad Evil Guy) because they are extremely dangerous, able to be leveled, organized, and intelligent enough that you might be tempted to think you can reason with them.
And the whole ‘brain eating thing’ is just icing on the squishy, salty cake.
There’s a bunch of cannon information on them, and other abberations, in the Lords Of Madness book, which is highly recommended if you’re into that sort of thing.
They are an excellent horror monster with a strong sense of ‘other’, in part because of the frankly bizarre reproductive cycle that involves taking a sapient humanoid host for the body and parasitising it while it’s sill alive.
But Illithids are more complicated than they look (and they already look complicated), and they look like they’re actually being domesticated or farmed.
I present to you the so-called Vampire Illithid.
You can see this dude (gender neutral, they’re canonically true hermaphrodites like most snails are) looks an awful lot like the classic Illithid, but with several vital differences.
winter or spring? romance or fantasy? lace or satin? ice cream cone or snow cone? bath or shower? iced coffee or hot coffee? tv shows or films? early mornings or late nights? waffles or pancakes? antique or brand new?
A Knight a Day No. 6, Knight Slayer – A strange, three-eyed warrior who wanders the world, testing his might by defeating the most highly regarded knights in the land.
A note – I actually did my first drawing of this guy in my sketchbook with a brushpen and two blue copic markers, two years ago at an internship. He was the drawing that gave me the idea for this whole project. Since then I’ve gone through like 4 iterations of the project because I wanted to change something about how I was doing it. And he’s still here when I’m finally finishing it! He’s a sketchbook veteran at this point. His new name is Grandad.
Knight a Day No. 4, Lera the Rogue – After deserting the army because of its uselessness, she founded a guild of mercenaries, head hunters, and rangers whose purpose is to track and kill the parties of pirates and raiders who terrorize the countryside.
ifesbob 