[video] Mike Mearls on the Illithid Spelljamming empire

[Big Mac]

D&D Beyond have interviewed Mike Mearls in a pair of connected interviews about Mind Flayers in Dungeons & Dragons and Githyanki and Githzerai in Dungeons & Dragons:

Mind Flayers in Dungeons & Dragons

We take a look at the Illithids and their masters the Elder Brains on dndbeyond.com An official digital toolset for Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition.
Published on 12 Dec 2017

Githyanki and Githzerai in Dungeons & Dragons

Published on 14 Dec 2017

I've heard fans suggesting that WotC will not bring back Spelljammer and also that (in the unlikely event that they do bring back Spelljamme they will change it). The way that Mike Mearls talks makes it clear that he is not intending to throw away the crystal spheres or the Phlogiston.

Mentioned in these videos:

• The mind flayers used to have a spelljamming empire that spanned most, if not all of the crystal spheres,
• The illithids are the first race to have a spelljamming empire,
• Illithids are powerful, but they are really just the tools of the elder brains,
• Gith smashed the mind flayer empire (and the githyanki and the githzerai hunt down and kill any illithids that attempt to reorganise),
• Individual elder brains attempt to come up with plots that will allow them to reestablish their lost empire,
• Nautiloids may be one of the oldest ship designs in the Spelljammer universe (the illithids may be the oldest race to learn how to spelljam),
• Nobody knows how Gith destroyed the illithid empire. The mind flayers don't talk about it, the githyanki and githzerai don't talk about it and even the gods don't talk about it,
• Gith's followers split into the two factions we know today after the illithid empire was destroyed,
• Gith went to Hell (seems like they renamed the Nine Hells) to strike a deal with Tiamat, and never returned,
• Vlaakith returned in Gith's place and told her followers that she had been sent to lead them until Gith returned,
• Some red dragons have been ordered to help the githyanki.
• The service that red dragons provide to the githyanki interfers with their usual ageing process, and therefore stops them growing into larger dragons (so this service is a big deal).

A few people have (understandably) gone nuts about this, suggesting this is "evidence" that Spelljammer is coming back. I'm not totally sure about that, but I'm confident that it debunks the idea that WotC are "going to toss out the idea of Spelljammer being a setting based on the Materiel Plane". I think that a potential 5th Edition Spelljammer product would be very usable by a 2nd Edition fan.

My main line of thought now is: Will WotC use the illithids (and their nautiloids) and one or both of the gith races as the framing mechanism for one of the upcoming 2018 D&D products?

[Zeromaru X]

The plot of Gith, Tiamat, and Vlaakith (and Ephelomon, the red dragon) its covered in the 4e Scales of War AP. If you don't want to play it, you should read it, because that AP is very good.

As for the Spelljammer setting, there is this twitt of Jeremy Crawford about the D&D multiverse, and the phlogiston and the Crystal Spheres are part of it.

EDIT:
Mike Mearls has this one.

[shesheyan]

Interesting news. I loved the Spelljammer box. If they came out with 5E material I'd seriously consider starting a DD5E campaign.

[Dread Delgath]

I have the entire Spelljammer 2e library. I'd love to run a 5e SJ campaign! Even a short one shot into the phlog.

If Mike Mearls is talking about it, to paraphrase a comment on the yt channel: "without going into much detail, but more detail necessary to set up a future campaign" I cannot imagine that WotC are NOT working on a Spelljammer book for 2018.

I'm calling Broadway in the other thread.

[sam]

I will be happy to see a more stylish version of Spelljammer. The problem is that they are thinking of everyone getting started quickly and not wanting to make an entire product line,then how many Spelljammer elements they will retain.

[GMWestermeyer]

• The illithids are the first race to have a spelljamming empire,

Not sure who this fanboy Mearls is, but he is wrong, the Thrikreen predeate the illithid empire according to canon.

[Zeromaru X]

Its the current lead writer and rules designer of D&D 5e.

But yeah, I've also read that there were spelljamming races way before the illithids came from the future to found their empire in the past.

[Dread Delgath]

Revisionist D&D has never impressed me, and has turned me off from buying a product immediately.

Perhaps Mearls should stick to simply converting the monsters & races crunch, and leave the fluff alone.

Adding something original to a beloved setting has always been a good idea, seldom followed through successfully.

I would have said (and am still saying it now) that WotC should have learned that lesson from TSR in the 90's when they trashed the World of Greyhawk, however, I can look back on all that now and actually find gems hidden in post Wars Greyhawk books, so I will retract that statement as soon as I type it.

WotC continued this trend with the Forgotten Realms, especially post 3.5 era. The Forgotten Realms now looks like a pastiche of someone's home campaign.

Please, Mr. Mearls,
Do not screw up the limited library of Spelljammer books on our shelf by revising SJ history, and keep those kinds of ideas in your own campaign. Please publish original content to add to that which already exists.

From a long-time fan of TSR 2nd edition era settings,
Thanks.

[Big Mac]

The plot of Gith, Tiamat, and Vlaakith (and Ephelomon, the red dragon) its covered in the 4e Scales of War AP. If you don't want to play it, you should read it, because that AP is very good.

I'll have to check that out. I've not been too bothered by githyanki/githzerai in the past, but if they are launching attacks on the more established illithid groups, I think that an attack on an illithid dominated world, like Falx, would be almost certain, at some point.

As for the Spelljammer setting, there is this twitt of Jeremy Crawford about the D&D multiverse, and the phlogiston and the Crystal Spheres are part of it.

EDIT:
Mike Mearls has this one.

I think I prefer Mike Mearls's words slightly over Jeremy Crawford's "The worlds occupy pockets of the Material Plane—sort of like planets but in a space shaped by magic and divine forces." But I do think the "local interpretation" thing is the key to getting it all to work together. (Otherwise people would need to tear up the Ghostwalk cosmology, in order to use the setting in a multi-world campaign.)

[Big Mac]

Interesting news. I loved the Spelljammer box. If they came out with 5E material I'd seriously consider starting a DD5E campaign.

Having watched both the videos and seen that Mike Mearls definitely is not proposing to reboot the Spelljammer multiverse, I'm very interested in seeing what a 5th Edition Spelljammer product could do. I wouldn't consider starting a 5e campaign, but I would buy the book and consider retroconverting it.

[Big Mac]

I will be happy to see a more stylish version of Spelljammer. The problem is that they are thinking of everyone getting started quickly and not wanting to make an entire product line,then how many Spelljammer elements they will retain.

That's my concern. If they have to fit the entire thing into what could very much end up as a one-shot, would there be enough space.

However, if you look at Storm King's Thunder you can see that's a 256 page hardback. Compare that to the original Spelljammer: AD&D Adventures in Space boxed set, which has two 96 page books, and you can see that it is possible to have a hardback that contains more pages than a 2e boxed set. (When I first saw Hackjammer I thought it was tiny compared to a 2e SJ book too, but then found out the pages were a lot thinner.)

I do think that, if they build a Realmspace adventure, and have sidebars that show a GM how to swap out the Realmspace planets for Greyspace planets, Krynnspace planets or a GM's homebrew planetary system...or maybe even Eberron planets, that would be a workable format for a mega-adventure.

[Big Mac]

• The illithids are the first race to have a spelljamming empire,

Not sure who this fanboy Mearls is, but he is wrong, the Thrikreen predeate the illithid empire according to canon.

Oh, come on Paul. Do you really have to throw childish insults at Mike Mearls? There are a ton of positive vibes in that video and you had to pick the one thing that you don't like and be rude about him because of it.

That was a video about the illithids, so he could still insert a thrikreen civilisation into an earlier part of the timeline if he wanted to, but you know full well that the 2e Spelljammer canon is badly organised and that it would be very easy for someone to overlook something that was never properly written down in any canon SJ product. Many of us have slightly different interpretations of how things are supposed to work.

[Big Mac]

Its the current lead writer and rules designer of D&D 5e.

But yeah, I've also read that there were spelljamming races way before the illithids came from the future to found their empire in the past.

That's kind of a bit like the plot of The Terminator, where you have Skynet trying to change the past. The illithids going back in time is a way to "cheat" and win.

Presumably, there would have been an original run-through of the D&D multiverse, where the illithids were not from the future and then they would have got to the end of that multiverse and jumped back to the beginning. I can imagine this would introduce a cascade of changes.

If illithids really could come back, from the future, you would think that they would warn themselves not to create Gith.

[Big Mac]

Revisionist D&D has never impressed me, and has turned me off from buying a product immediately.

Perhaps Mearls should stick to simply converting the monsters & races crunch, and leave the fluff alone.

Adding something original to a beloved setting has always been a good idea, seldom followed through successfully.

It didn't seem like revisionism to me. He was only really talking about the illithids (and gityhanki/githzeria) after all.

I would have said (and am still saying it now) that WotC should have learned that lesson from TSR in the 90's when they trashed the World of Greyhawk, however, I can look back on all that now and actually find gems hidden in post Wars Greyhawk books, so I will retract that statement as soon as I type it.

It's funny you should say that. Mike Mearls was asked about Greyhawk recently and said that he would want to return to the Greyhawk that Gary Gyagax created.

I'm not personally convinced that it is possible to go back to the Greyhawk from before Gary Gygax was booted out of TSR without

WotC continued this trend with the Forgotten Realms, especially post 3.5 era. The Forgotten Realms now looks like a pastiche of someone's home campaign.

Please, Mr. Mearls,
Do not screw up the limited library of Spelljammer books on our shelf by revising SJ history, and keep those kinds of ideas in your own campaign. Please publish original content to add to that which already exists.

From a long-time fan of TSR 2nd edition era settings,
Thanks.

I'm quite hopeful about this (still hypothetical) 5th Edition Spelljammer product.

To be honest, the entire 4th Edition time-jump means that anything connected with 5th Edition Forgotten Realms is set so far in the future of the Spelljammer product line (and therefore Realmspace) that there is very little of it I can use without rebooting the period the adventure is set in. And I'm anticipating WotC adding options to reboot future D&D adventures, to get them to be compatible with several D&D settings.

[Jaid]

Its the current lead writer and rules designer of D&D 5e.

But yeah, I've also read that there were spelljamming races way before the illithids came from the future to found their empire in the past.

That's kind of a bit like the plot of The Terminator, where you have Skynet trying to change the past. The illithids going back in time is a way to "cheat" and win.

Presumably, there would have been an original run-through of the D&D multiverse, where the illithids were not from the future and then they would have got to the end of that multiverse and jumped back to the beginning. I can imagine this would introduce a cascade of changes.

If illithids really could come back, from the future, you would think that they would warn themselves not to create Gith.

my personal assumptions:

the illithids from the astromundi clusters are the originals. people don't generally leave the sphere because reasons, but we know the illithid seem to have developed there including their very own creation myth that *isn't* "we came from the future to escape a huge disaster", and certainly the illithid of the astromundi cluster are not fully developed into the illithid of elsewhere (for example, they still have gods, which most illithid elsewhere have stopped worshipping, and iirc no explicit mention of brain pools or reproduction via parasitic tadpoles). furthermore, they've got a society of human slaves that are just barely beginning to develop psionic powers. why, hello there ancestors of the gith races, how are you today? anyways, the illithid from the astromundi cluster would eventually abandon the sphere via planar travel (with difficulty) on account of other major spoilers in the astromundi cluster (maybe the disaster they were fleeing wasn't the gith rebellion, and it would certainly explain their later obsession about extinguishing suns in other spheres), but wouldn't know the location of their home sphere because you can't just leave astromundi so they don't know where it is on any chart, and they don't know much about the sphere in the current timeline either for the same reason (they likely don't even realize how different the illithid of astromundi are, if they even know there are illithid there at all).

as to why they don't try to alter history, maybe they figure in their current version of history they're a major empire found on pretty much every world in the known spheres and many more besides, so yeah... the gith rebellion sucked... but there's plenty of good stuff that they're risking if they try to change their own past. also, i'm pretty sure it's implied that the gith rebellion chased them back through time anyways (possibly without fully grasping what they were doing, so that the gith don't have the same "we came from the future" origin story), so it's not like they would really get rid of the gith anyways.

edit: oh, and uhhh... i'm pretty sure skull and crossbows is canon, and iirc it's pretty clear on the thri-kreen empire being super duper older than anything else.

[The Dark]

edit: oh, and uhhh... i'm pretty sure skull and crossbows is canon, and iirc it's pretty clear on the thri-kreen empire being super duper older than anything else.

Old, but not older than anything else. Tiktiktik knows of the Juna from "The Outpost," but they were extinct or withdrawn from spelljamming society before he was born 4000 years ago (and were gone long enough ago that they were mysterious legends referred to by the kreen as "Old Gods").

[Jaid]

edit: oh, and uhhh... i'm pretty sure skull and crossbows is canon, and iirc it's pretty clear on the thri-kreen empire being super duper older than anything else.

Old, but not older than anything else. Tiktiktik knows of the Juna from "The Outpost," but they were extinct or withdrawn from spelljamming society before he was born 4000 years ago (and were gone long enough ago that they were mysterious legends referred to by the kreen as "Old Gods").

well considering he's from the end of the empire, that doesn't say much. remember, he's far enough along in the kreen empire that there are ancient records so old that he doesn't even know they exist.

[AuldDragon]

"Older than anything else in current existence" covers the situation. Everything older is dead and gone now.

Jeff

[night_druid]

To be perfectly honest, I don't care for an all-reaching illithid empire that controlled the whole Prime Material. It clashes with the established lore of every published campaign setting. Name one that mentions illithids dominating the whole world at some point in the past; the closest is the Realmspace world of Glyth but not FR itself. The only places that I know where the illithid empire is mentioned is in Planescape and a few generic, illithid-centric products. I think WotC realized this and did a "course correction" with the illithid backstory in Lords of Madness. Personally I'd have the illithid empire being from an alternate prime material, perhaps one that's now largely uninhabitable. The illithids in the prime material in which Krynn/Toril/Oerth occupy are refugees that escaped their home plane.

[Corsair14]

Interesting concept on the Empire. Would make for good high end campaigning.

Many of us who play 5e have been harping on them for quite awhile on releasing campaign books similar to Sword Coast Adventures guide but for the older campaign worlds. We already have the fluff of all those campaign worlds, several decades worth plus fanon. What we have been pushing and Ill use SJ since that's the forum, 5e conversions on races, classes and archetypes specific to SJ, SJ specific weapons like more in detail black powder weapons, space combat and ships, and general SJ rules. All could easily fit in one hard backed book the size of SCAG along with a little fluff and such n book and on their monthly Unearthed Arcana updates.

We kind want this for Dark Sun, Planescape and Ravenloft too. The other campaign worlds are generic enough to be easy to do in 5th like many of us already do. It isn't rocket science to run 5e Dragonlance or Greyhawk. But their more odd worlds are a bit more rules intensive and need some updates instead of every DM winging it for themselves.

[AxesnOrcs]

ok so, Mearls is saying the Elder Brains are a separate species from the Illithids that control them? Instead of them being conglomerations of Illithid brains that control them? Is there really much of a functional difference? Ancient multiverse vs universe vs sphere vs world spanning empire only differs in the scale and functionally not by much because it happened so long long ago.

[night_druid]

ok so, Mearls is saying the Elder Brains are a separate species from the Illithids that control them? Instead of them being conglomerations of Illithid brains that control them?

To be fair, that's been that way back at least as long as Lords of Madness (3e), if not back to the Illithiad (2e). I always took the Elder Brains as being more of a hive mind/afterlife for illithids, not unlike the Eldar Infinity Circuits in Warhammer 40k. A kind of super-computer where illithids put their consciousnesses when they die to live out eternity in some sort of VR system, and may consult for information, but individual illithids being, well, individuals creating their own plots of and schemes. Each illithid has their own schemes, minions, and the like, occasionally working together but just as often working against one another. Basically each one is akin to a mob boss.

[AxesnOrcs]

ok so, Mearls is saying the Elder Brains are a separate species from the Illithids that control them? Instead of them being conglomerations of Illithid brains that control them?

To be fair, that's been that way back at least as long as Lords of Madness (3e), if not back to the Illithiad (2e). I always took the Elder Brains as being more of a hive mind/afterlife for illithids, not unlike the Eldar Infinity Circuits in Warhammer 40k. A kind of super-computer where illithids put their consciousnesses when they die to live out eternity in some sort of VR system, and may consult for information, but individual illithids being, well, individuals creating their own plots of and schemes. Each illithid has their own schemes, minions, and the like, occasionally working together but just as often working against one another. Basically each one is akin to a mob boss.

As far back as the Illithiad, which I think is the earliest mention of elder brains, they varied from mental despots to combination library and librarian. It wasn't until Lords of Madness that elder brains turned into mental despots with some allowing varying degrees of independent thought.

I also prefer the VR afterlife that the illithids believe.

[Jaid]

could've swore brain pools were made by basically a whole bunch of illithid sacrificing their brains at the same time into a pool, and then all the brains kinda merge into an elder brain. i wouldn't exactly describe that as being a completely separate species... they'd definitely at the very least be closely related.

[AxesnOrcs]

could've swore brain pools were made by basically a whole bunch of illithid sacrificing their brains at the same time into a pool, and then all the brains kinda merge into an elder brain. i wouldn't exactly describe that as being a completely separate species... they'd definitely at the very least be closely related.

I think Mearls is saying that in 5e they are now a separate species instead of the conglomeration of brains it's been since 2e.