Illithids in Ortloh

History

A small colony of Illithids has lived on Ortloh for a very long time. Probably as long as the Elves.

There has been one Elder Brain and the colony has survived for a very long time with its way of doing things. Contrary to come colonies that attempt to grow and rule parts of the land the inhabit, this Elder Brain plans have been to come up with a spaceship in order to expand the Illithids to other worlds.

This has been working since they have had such a ship for a few decades now and have been flying through the Astral plane in search of new worls to conquer. However, the search has not been very fruititious so far.

The reason that the Illithids have been able to build a rocket ship in the first place is because they live among the artificiers. Actually, the Elder Brain created that environment by attracting all the artificiers to the North East part of the Ortloh land. With so many artificier's brain, the small towns in the region were transformed to magnificient modern cities with tall buildings and all sorts mechanical systems to handle a lot of the city work automatically.

Illithid Populations

There are four known Illithid Populations.

Colony (Smoosha)

As mentioned above, there is colony by the Artificier's cities.

These Illithids are controlled by Smoosha, an Elder Brain, whose goal is to conquer other worlds and become the new Emperor of the Illithids.

Some of the colony members are found all around Ortloh as some missions require them to travel wide and far. The Elder Brain has 4 or 5 such adventurers searching for something at a time. These are still connected to Smoosha, only, from that far away, they can't directly connect to him. They will be on their own during their trip making them much easier targets. However, they are very difficult to find since they tend to travel at night and stay away from heavily populated areas.

Although they are generally asked to eat brains of lesser being while on such trips, it happens that humanoids get attacked. This is when various police factions will want to track such rogue Illithid.

Drow's Friend (Ke'leh)

At times, an Illithid gets a shock which makes it independent from its Elder Brain. This happened to Ke'leh while on a search for a Drow in the Ice Mountains. Since then, Ke'leh has lived as a renagade with the Drows who feed him. In exchange, he built a large library with all the knowledge found in the Ortloh world. Ke'leh is especially fond of all the books he can find about all the Gith people.

The library is open to anyone who can reach Ke'leh and doesn't get his brain eaten. Drows have an automatic right of passage.

The Kraken Baby (Squoodoi)

The Kraken faction, Yoralm, includes many members. One day, while trying to get some Tarrasque skin for the Illithid spaceship, Squoodoi was hit really hard on the head and left for dead. A few hours later, he woke up and was not connected to Smoosha, the Elder Brain.

Since then, Squoodoi the Renegade has been thanking the Krakens for saving his life from the pressure of the Illithid's colony. He even joined the Yoralm faction of which he now controls a branch toward the North East of Ortloh.

Squoodoi is still very evil and only befriended the Krakens themselves, not the people who work with him in the Yoralm faction. Some of whom he has eaten the brains already...

Squoodoi's surename is The Kraken Baby since he looks like a squid which reminds the other Yoralm faction members of the Giant Squid Kraken.

The Alhoons

The city of [the dead] hosts a few Alhoons. Those Illithids who decided to learn magic and become a form of Undead Lich (Illithilich).

These Illithids are hidden pretty deep under the old city since they are not welcomed by most of the Necromancers at the surface.

The Illithids Spaceships

A very long time ago, the Illithids were able to build Nautiloids. A conch shaped ship that could fly through the Astral plane. Only that technology was lost and the Illithids Empire fell.

Smoosha had memory of a different technology that allowed a people to visit their three moons and other material worlds. Starting on that knowledge, he decided to draw on specific human minds by congragating many artificiers and other progress oriented people in one place. This paid off.

The Illithids again have a spaceship they use to travel between material worlds. Contrary to their Nautiloids which allowed them to travel very quickly by teleporting an entire colony from one world to the other in a few hours, these spaceships take months of travel. Because of that flaw and even though the search started several decades ago, the search has not made much progress.

Building a Spaceship

The Elder Brain took several things in consideration. The spaceship would be noisy and quite visible since it has a strong light when taking off.

To circumvent these issues, Smoosha hired three powerful wizards through the ages.

The first, Matoid, was offered to make the ship take off and land using Telekinetic magic. After years of trying, this technique just did not work. The Illithids have the innate ability to levitate so it did sound like a good idea at the time. The fact is that the known telekinetic magic is just not enough to push an entire, really heavy ship in the air. Or at least Matoid was not good enough to find such magic. This is when Matoid's brain was eaten by Smoosha [TODO: verify that this is possible]. Instead the Elder Brain found out that they could use a combustion system like our Earthly rockets. However, that meant getting rid of the aweful noise...

The second, Martor the Illusionist, worked on a way to render the ship invisible. His invisibility spell, however, required the ship to be convered by the skin of one animal. The only one animal large enough that the Illithids found was the Tarrasque. Each ship require the skin of one Tarrasque. This dearly renders the task of building a new ship especially difficult. Tarrasques are rare. Once the ship is ready, the Illithids use a ritual to cast the Invisibility spell over the ship. This renders some of the participating Illithids suseptible to magic and over the ages a few have become Alhoons as a result.

The third, Thunrat the Great, worked directly with the Elder Brain on a way to hide at least most of the noise. This worked to some extend. Instead of hiding all of the noise, though, they ended up transforming it in what mostly sounds like the roar of a desperate dragon. Echoes of such roars have reached the entire land of Ortloh. The Silent spell just was not enough to work on an entire spaceship. Since Thunrat's death, the Illithids make use of Thralls that were Rogue with the ability to cast spells.

As a result, building a new Illithid spaceship takes about 10 years. Currently, they have only three and are working on the forth one.

Additional Information

The Ki-rin can be found in the
Volo's Guide to Monsters
D&D 5th Edition
 

The Illithids or Mind Flayers are first described in the Monster Manual and in great details in Volo's Guide to Monsters. For better understanding of each one of the entries here, I suggest reading those pages too.