Mind Flares

You believe your problems started when you took a left instead of a right, and ended up traveling further underground rather than escaping the labyrinthemed caverns.

You're hopelessly lost at this point, your light is fading, and you hear strange noises echoing throughout the tunnels.

Suddenly, you stop mid-step, and your mind goes blank as you struggle to remember what you're doing or even who you are anymore.

Ahead of you on the edge of the shadows, you see a pair of eyes gazing at you, and the figure

steps closer to reveal a humanoid entity with a face filled with tentacles.

Stunned and unable to move, you stand helpless as the figure spreads its tentacles and closes them around your head.

This is an illithid, more commonly known as a mind flayer, certainly one of the more terrifying species

of creatures to live beneath the ground.

Mind flayers are highly intelligent evil entities with a fearsome mastery of psionic powers that

seek to enslave or devour the minds of any other sapient creature they come across.

They are among the most iconic monsters in the world of D&D,

and will be taken a brief look at their capabilities, their history, and their societies.

Mindflayers first appeared not in an official D&D book,

but rather the first issue of the TSR newsletter,

in their Creature Features section from the spring of 1975.

The article describes them as super intelligent, man-shaped creatures with four mouth tentacles

that it uses to strike its prey, penetrating the brain so that it can devour it.

They also possess the mind blast power, capable of a variety of effects based on the target's intelligence,

from insanity to confusion, to stunning it, or even death.

This info is mostly repeated in the Eldridge Wizardry supplement a year later.

They would go on to be featured in the first Monster Manual for A D&D First Edition,

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