Please help me settle something
When someone infected with a mindflayer tadpole undergoes ceremorphosis and turns into a mindflayer, is the original person "dead" or just "changed"?
Like did the original person's soul go onto some plane of the afterlife, where they could potentially be contacted, maybe become a vengeful ghost, etc? Or is it more like a vampire/lich thing where the original soul is still in the body, just evil now?
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Which edition?
5E
just "changed" (severely enough to become NPC)
In previous editions their psychic essence is gone, only a Miracle can bring them back. There doesn't seem to be a miracle spell for 5e so I dunno lol
The tadpole eats the brain of the host, slowly and painfully, and replaces it with its own brain matter. The creature that remains slowly morphs into an illithid, changing to match its new genetic code. No canon will ever dislodge this from my mind.
What makes illithids scary is that they are not heroic fantasy. That they come from a world entirely unlike the one the adventurers come from and work by different rules. They don't care about your resurrection spells, and don't care about your swords, their power is in their mind and their evil alchemy is some form of other-dimensional science that is completely inscrutable. They are Lovecraft in a world where everyone else isn't. Their parasitic offspring kill you in the most horrific way and leave only enough behind that if the illithid wants to trick you it can use your dead comrade's memories as a mental skinsuit. It doesn't reproduce by magic, it reproduces by biological processes that can not be undone. They study magic because it is interesting, like we'd study history, or sociology, or music. They are always evil, because they hate all that is good, because they are not like you or me.
Frick you Larian. Frick youuuuuuu..!
I mean anon Larian did a pretty good job on portraying that. Just because some morons fell for Emperor's lies doesn't mean he didn't lie to hell and back to get you on his side.
>The tadpole eats the brain of the host
Correct.
>slowly and painfully
It's absurdly rapid in metabolic terms, IIRC a matter of minutes.
>and replaces it with its own brain matter
Incorrect, the tadpole undergoes metamorphosis into a mass of brain tissue. It's a fine difference, but an important one.
>The creature that remains slowly morphs into an illithid, changing to match its new genetic code
I don't recall anything that's explicitly genetic alteration, there's a few different takes on "part-illithid" relying on the grey area of it being neither certain nor total, and the fine difference mentioned above kicks in with Elder Brains discarding the repurposed anatomy to live as purely Illithid tissue.
It's ambiguous whether the inconsistency is "lying schemer" or "quantum ogre" in nature, given how many characters have that going on. Especially given how it crops up in high-trust conditions.
It also sickens me that Larian made up their own special bullshit instead of leaning on the old Adversary and the months-long timeframe for anatomical changes finishing.
In the adventure Descent into Avernus it makes it very clear that Stelmane was a mind flayer thrall and her stroke was caused by the mind flayer to make her more compliant.
Dead dead and not resurrectable without literal divine intervention restoring the person as they are completely eradicated on every level by the process.
Dead. They aren't really being changed so much as being eaten from the inside out and having their thoughts stolen. It's a predation, not an absorption. Frankly it's amazingly unfun.
Original person is gone 100%
Original person is 100% dead.
The tadpole crawls in through either the nose, ears, or slithers in behind the eye. The tadpole then delicately eats away at the bottom of the hosts brain while simultaneously replacing that tissue with its' own until the tadpole is seamlessly connected to the stem of the host's body and can now act as the host's new brain. After the old brain has been severed from its' control over their own body the tadpole will eat the rest of the brain over the course of a week: acquiring stores of fat and stealing memories from its' host to better mimic them until it finishes its' development.
During this week the host won't actually feel any pain, their brain isn't connected to any inputs and the brain itself has no pain receptors. From the victim's perspective they're stuck in some kind of waking-lucid-dreaming state where things make less and less sense, black outs become longer and more frequent, and they begin to forget things. From the perspective of the victim's friends & allies they'll appear initially drowsy and distracted- the tadpole gaining it's bearings, but over the course of the week will give the impression of recovery.
At any time during this week the process can be interrupted by completely destroying the head (a long with the brain and the tadpole in it) and then resurrecting the victim. AFTER a week this is impossible as by that time the tadpole will have succeeded in consuming not just the brain, but replacing all the cells inside their host's body with their own mindflayer cells. The tadpole essentially now just waiting for a moment to sneak off to somewhere private and safe to rip off their host's old skin and emerge as if it were a chrysalis.
After this point the victim 'can' be resurrected, but it has to be with a sufficiently powerful spell that can resurrect somebody from no remains.
gone as in dead, unless he can take over, which is extremely rare and greatly feared by the mind flayers
>"dead"
dead with the exception being, see the adventure from Ravenloft D&D 2e "thoughts of darkness", the paladin survives it. We had a thread. This is extremely ridiculously rare.
https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/thread/91669877/#91669877
a single post if you don't want to go through the thread searching for paladin, drassark, tadpole, flayer, illithid and other terms
https://archive.4plebs.org/tg/search/image/rwDhZbBHuhkifPHTouxsVw/
>drassark
drassak
OP here, looks like "dead" is the consensus. Death via brain destruction, like if a giant just stepped on your head, so the soul probably just departs, potentially very angry about the whole thing. Vengeful revenant plothook methinks. Thanks for the input all
You're welcome, go with grace.
I put a tadpole under your pillow
Let's say my magic-user becomes an Illithid, what happens to my Clone, is it activated and does the Illithid become inert?
>Let's say my magic-user becomes an Illithid, what happens to my Clone, is it activated and does the Illithid become inert?
Several things happen:
-Your clone absorbs your soul (wherever it may be) exactly as if you were dead.
-The mindflayer may, or may not, become one of those rogue magic-using mindflayers.
-The mindflayer does not become inert: the mindflayer eats the physical body, the worm becomes the brain, at no point does it have any relationship with your soul, nor does it need your soul to operate your body since the worm functions as the brain and your body is really just fuel for this process.
Begs the question how dualism strictly works in setting.
Clearly, mechanically, the body and soul are distinct objects. Decapitation and brain destruction seem to kill you instantly... And the flayer swapping in for your brain can control the body. This implies we are on some nebulous connection between body and soul in the brain area.
Mental stats are retained by the soul when separated. Yet, you can take mental stat damage from physical processes. So the body has a role in cognition... I guess? Even though it is implied the body is just a meat puppet for the metaphysical soul.
why would there be a single correct answer? mindflayers aren't real. whatever you decide happens, happens.