Given my love for Lovecraft's stories, it's no small wonder, then, that this creature should resonate so powerfully with me. In the AD&D Monster Manual 1st ed., Gygax expands on the creatures and there's a hint of ecology but with lots of room for adaptation and improvement. I always envision mind flayers as a sort of pre-historic creature that dwells in impossibly ancient ruins and underground, whose empire existed long ago but is no more. They scheme and weave plots to corrupt the surface races much like Robert E. Howard's serpent people. It's almost as easy to make them an extra-dimensional race or people from the stars that were trapped in the fantasy world wherein the adventures live.
What is your favorite D&D / AD&D creature and why? It can be a description, its powers or even its name. How did you use them in your campaigns? Where they a major plot element or just another foe to be vanquished?
3 comments:
While the Mind Flayer is indeed cool, the MM/AD&D version of it required the psionics rules which I, as a kid, never used. So, like almost all the demons and devils, they never saw the table in my original AD&D campaign back in the 70s/80s. Shame.
The psionic rules were actually one of the main reasons (the other being the incredibly poor quality of the MM2) that I stopped playing AD&D. You simply couldn't go above a certain level before most of your monsterous opponents needed them.
I have "The Burrower's Beneath" by Brian Lumley in storage! I thought I read it 'once upon a time' but if I have, its been over 20 years ago. Reading this article prompts me to rummage through my storage unit tomorrow (day off!) and find it! :)
When I got the Monster Manual, I didn't yet have the PHB or DMG, so I used the MM with Holmes and later with Moldvay, Cook & Marsh's BX rules, ignoring any reference to Psionics. :)
And while AD&D had the Mind Flayer...Regular D&D had the Devourer who ate wizard brains and took not just their spell ability but (thanks to Bruce Heard's Work in the Voyages of Princess Ark Series) the personality of the individual brain accessed.
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