Untold Lineages - Illithids and Ceremorphs (Mind Flayers)

What do I get?

• Playable Lineage Rules For Mind Flayers and Mind Flayer Tadpole Infestation
• 24 Mind Flayer themed Features, Feats and Flaws in a structured feat selection tree
• 2 Ceremorphic Creature Statblocks: Gynosphythid and Mind Flayer Soul Knife

Sure, you’re a nice DM. You want to give your players what they want. But when what they want is to play “Something from the Monster Manual”, then that’s just not practical. Or is it? 

Illithids - evil brain eating aberrations, or misunderstood eusocial humanoids? Many people are attracted to the thought of playing as a mind flayer character, yet they often focus on the positives and fail to consider the moral and ethical downsides to being a brain eating monster. Should players be able to portray mind flayers? Whatever your view on the morality of a being who needs to consume the neural matter of intelligent creatures in order to survive they surely can’t be more morally repugnant than, say, your traditional vampire (and we already wrote alternative Untold Lineages rules for playing as one of those).

DMs running longer term games often find they’ve written themselves into a corner - getting a PC infected with a mindflayer tadpole seems like fun and games, right up until the moment the party fails to remove it in time. Faced with the possibility of removing a lynchpin character from the campaign or allowing the player to play on as an abberation, which is the “lesser evil”?

DMs may allow players to use this material to allow a PC to play as an evil illithid, or as a victim of a partially successful ceremorphosis whose own personality survives the transformation. Alternatively the structures suggested here can be used by DMs to create a wider variety of beast based aberrations with a range of CRs and fully realize their bizarre concept for creatures such as the brain eating flail snails which we present at the end of this material.

Our approach to playable monsters begins with the use of Tasha’s custom lineages, or the selection of the closest available official race or lineage choice, but we don’t stop there. We break down all of the cooler powers and features of the monster stat block and rebuild them as an optional feat tree. This lets players select the aspects of the monster they find most appealing as the character levels up. By making PCs pay for the cool bits using their ASI increases and carefully arranging the feat tree structures, the power level of the new monstrous PC is kept firmly in line with the rest of the party.