Kryslin
[Has Delusions of Authorship]
- Location
- Mythic Iowa
You sir, are Crazy Peoples. I salute you.Thanks for pointing me in the right direction. Might just take it as an excuse to reread everything in case I forgot other stuff though.
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Scaling Up
- Thread starter Kryslin
- Start date
Kryslin
[Has Delusions of Authorship]
- Location
- Mythic Iowa
<sigh>
My editor over at the CTC has had a few ideas about introducing a character of his, named "Jill Ithid". A rather personable Mind Flayer. As in, she gets along just fine with people, despite her horrendous eating habits and diet.
I think that's as close as I'm going to get to a shoggoth maid.Hmm, maybe some competition for Fugly Bob's... Tiki Lili's diner? Gas & Grease, but no Fuel.
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Fun fact: There actually is a light novel called My Maid is a Formless Entity, where a young man living on his own gets a package from his archeologist father with a note saying to put it in hot water for three minutes. So he sticks the contents in a hot bath, waits three minutes, and is soon introducing himself to his new maid Tekeli-Chan.<sigh>
My editor over at the CTC has had a few ideas about introducing a character of his, named "Jill Ithid". A rather personable Mind Flayer. As in, she gets along just fine with people, despite her horrendous eating habits and diet.
Hmm, maybe some competition for Fugly Bob's... Tiki Lili's diner? Gas & Grease, but no Fuel.
Wrong story. Taylor Varga for your fix of that.
Also, the Micro-Shoggoth had me giggling.
And it also made me realize that Brockton Bay is in the right area....
I'd be leery of introducing a Mind Flayer without a lot of planning, since their history is.... odd.
An interdimensional empire fleeing into the past from some unknown threat that scared even them is a pretty big rabbit hole to jump down.
Even if you took the easy way out and made Entities the unknown threat, its still weird.
Also, the Mind Flayer life cycle is the kind of nightmare fuel that would make even H.R Giger stop and go "damn, son!" Literally no sentient creature would put up with it. Anything who knew what an Illithid was would be shooting first and asking questions never.
- Location
- Sydney
Yeah not only do they need to eat a sentient being brain each month (it has to be an intelligent being they eat otherwise they starve to death so they can't eat cattle.) but they reproduce by inserting a tadpole like creatures into a humanoid which then devours them alive as it transforms them into a new Illithid. Frankly no human or similar species would accept them living nearby due to how we value our lives. There lives are incompatible with our own.
- Location
- Somewhere, Maybe
The threat is a known one: slave uprising. That's also where the Gith came from.
The Gith used to be the slaves of the Mind Flayers, but after thousands of generations, they slowly bred themselves a resistance to psionic powers while their masters got careless. After all, what is a slave revolt when the masters can simply mindcontrol the slaves back into line? But when the psionic resistance grew strong enough, the Gith found themselves free to act in a way they hadn't been able to in countless generations, and proceeded to vent an entire species' worth of pent-up rage on their former masters, massacring them in wholesale slaughter. Over, way over, 90% of the Ilithids died in the uprising, those few that could vanished through portals to the distant past, where the light of the suns was far too bright for them, which is why they live deep underground.
Yes, the Ilithid Empire was so far in the future that the universe was advancing towards Heat Death. Gives you an idea of how vast the timescale of their retreat was.
As to the Gith, once they (mostly) finished hunting down the Ilithids, they turned on each other, splintering into the Githzerai and the Githyanki, who went their separate ways.
- Location
- Somewhere, Maybe
That's the kinda-sorta-official story. Look, this stuff is lore spread over the past 40 years of gaming, and hundreds of books. I'm not going to be able to track down the exact reference. Especially as what is canon in one edition, might not be in the next.
But that's the story I was told when I got around to looking up Illithid lore, and I like it enough to run with it as headcanon if nothing else. IIRC, there was a 2nd edition suplement "Spelljammer" that went into more of this, but I got into D&D after that was no longer a thing.
Back then, TSR and later WotC had a policy that they would only support one edition of D&D at a time, and anything from the earlier editions would be swept under the rug and discontinued, no longer available for new players. They changed that with the advent (and subsequent flop) of 4th edition, and kept 3.5 around on the SRD site for those people who -hated- 4th edition and wanted to stick with 3.5. Which was a "surprising" amount, because WotC literally -forgot- to figure out how to pitch 4th edition to people who liked 3rd edition.
But that's a whole other discussion and I won't get into it for fear of derailing. Suffice it to say, if you got into D&D during 4th edition, you generally loved it, and 5th edition is a simplification and consolidation of 4th and 3rd edition. If you loved the gritty, grainy, somewhat-haphazard and natural feel of 3rd edition, then 4th edition was a slap in the face and a lot of 3rd ed players didn't like it.
Aaaaand shutting up now. Sorry. ^^
Jadesteele
Out of my Mind - Back in 5 Minutes
- Location
- half-way between 'Crazy' And 'Eccentric'
They brought both factions of Gith into 'Neverwinter' during the 'Undermountain' stuff, they covered it then - not sure if it was covered earlier though...
TV Tropes Page
Kryslin
[Has Delusions of Authorship]
- Location
- Mythic Iowa
As stated above, we now have a TV Tropes page, courtesy of @kip . It needs additions, because It's only got three entries on it.
Feel free to add to it, and remember to spoiler things that need it. Me, I'll just enjoy reading it, I actually have very little idea which tropes I'm abusing/subverting/lampshading.
KamenRaidaOOO3
(Verified Toku Nut)
- Location
- Wouldn't you like to know?
This also explains why the Illithids freak out the Aboleths so much. Aboleths have a genetic memory thing going, and the Illithids just appear one day.
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
Wouldn't that indicate that the mind flayers ran from their former slaves into the past, only to create the very situation they ran from over the course of millennia?
- Location
- Somewhere, Maybe
Very much so. The illithids are a Djinn Particle: they exist in the future because they existed in the past, but they exist in the past, because they existed in the future. The entire species is a fragment of a defunct timeline, trapped in the past because their future no longer exists. Predestination paradox.
YUP! Though this time their Gith slaves followed them back through time as well, and unless things somehow go very strange, I think that the timeline that the original ilithid empire arose in is entirely impossible now, given how deeply the Illithid and Gith have changed their own species' past.
Casualty once you start time traveling gets weird. The easiest way to wrap your head around it is to look at any time travel from a perspective outside the scope of any time travel shenanigans.
Mindflayers go back in time running from something they caused, now they're back in time, how could they possibly allow that to happen?
It already happened, they can't unhappen it, even if it looks like our future, its still their past.
Think of it this way, if you go back in time six months and hand yourself an umbrella, in six months time, do you need to time travel to hand yourself an umbrella again? Six months ago you remember being handed an umbrella, you were dry that day, ect. Many things happened as a direct result of that. Well, the opposite question, what happens if you don't go back? Lots of people jump right to "I won't have the umbrella!" but why? Lets assume you are sitting here umbrella in hand, trying to work out if you need to go back to 'upkeep' your own timeloop. If you don't go, what happens to that umbrella?
Einstein says you can't destroy matter or energy, Newton says an object at rest stays at rest unless acted on by an outside force.
So if you don't go... exactly what force would act to take the umbrella away from you?
It can't just 'never have existed' Einstein forbids that, Newton says it stays put in your hand until something makes it not. You doing nothing can't make it go away, something has to happen for it to go away.
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- Location
- Somewhere, Maybe
The concept of a Djinn Particle is an interesting one. Suppose you dig up an old book in your back yard that tells you how to make a time machine. So you make one, turn it on, and find yourself in the same spot, but 150 years earlier, and your time-machine turned out to be one-use only. So you bury the book in the same spot you found it, and go about your business while the book stays there until your younger self comes along and un-buries it.
WHERE DID THE BOOK COME FROM?
^^ That's the interesting question.
No it isn't.
That's the mistake everybody makes.
You put the book there.
The mistake is looking at a time loop from inside it, instead of from an outside reference point.
Imagine yourself as a spectator to this time loop 1000 years later. Everything flows nicely, wraps it self up and the universe moves on smoothly. Order of events look goofy to you, because you're in the middle of it, that's all.
You make the intuitive leap that the book came from one point in your timeline or another, because its you doing it. But you've never established that your time travel is the origin of the book, only that you discovered the book in two places in time.
Once an event happens its part of your casual past, even if you mucked up with time travel while doing its still your past, it still has happened, you doing something is the key. Like I mentioned before Newton demands something happen. You put the book there is the thing that happens.
This is the exact same deal as the umbrella example, imagine the opposite scenario. What happens if you don't bury the book? You still build a time machine and traveled back in time, you're standing there holding the book. Those things did happen to you, that's your pesonal past.
FaerieKnight79
Verified Pixie
- Location
- The Internet
@TypoNinja Clearly you aren't grasping the paradox involved. Even from an outside perspective it goes as follows
Person A built a time machine using a book they dug up.
The time machine is one way only.
Person A buries the book.
The place they buried the book is the exact location their past/future self will dig it up from.
Where exactly did the book come from?
The only reason the time machine was built is because Person A found the book while digging. The only reason the book was buried is Person A buried it after using the time machine. Which means the only reason the book exists to be found is... the book had been found. If Person A instead decided to burn the book after realizing the time machine they built and used is one way only, then how could they have dug it up in the first place?
The paradox exists only if multiversel theory is false and time is linear. If multiversel theory is true, then the very act of going back in time creates a new subset of reality for each possible choice. But if time is linear then the "how to build a time machine" is both the cause and the effect of it's own existance.
Or to put it another way, if I was to go back in time and marry someone, and our child just happened to be my father or mother... then how could I possibly have existed? Genetics being what they are, it's virtually impossible for me to have existed without me having existed to begin with and going back in time. Or take the idea of assassinating Hitler before he came to power. If you built a time machine and used it to go back to kill Hitler before WW1, then he wouldn't have lead Germany in WW2. So why the hell would you go back in time to kill Hitler? IF time is linear, these types of scenarios are an unsolvable paradox.
Person A built a time machine using a book they dug up.
The time machine is one way only.
Person A buries the book.
The place they buried the book is the exact location their past/future self will dig it up from.
Where exactly did the book come from?
The only reason the time machine was built is because Person A found the book while digging. The only reason the book was buried is Person A buried it after using the time machine. Which means the only reason the book exists to be found is... the book had been found. If Person A instead decided to burn the book after realizing the time machine they built and used is one way only, then how could they have dug it up in the first place?
The paradox exists only if multiversel theory is false and time is linear. If multiversel theory is true, then the very act of going back in time creates a new subset of reality for each possible choice. But if time is linear then the "how to build a time machine" is both the cause and the effect of it's own existance.
Or to put it another way, if I was to go back in time and marry someone, and our child just happened to be my father or mother... then how could I possibly have existed? Genetics being what they are, it's virtually impossible for me to have existed without me having existed to begin with and going back in time. Or take the idea of assassinating Hitler before he came to power. If you built a time machine and used it to go back to kill Hitler before WW1, then he wouldn't have lead Germany in WW2. So why the hell would you go back in time to kill Hitler? IF time is linear, these types of scenarios are an unsolvable paradox.
Don't say I'm clearly not grasping it when you clearly ignored the entire explanation.
Your entire stumbling block is reference frame based.
You've fixated on order of events trying to sort out what 'caused' what, when the answer is 'time travel is bullshit'.
The solution escapes so many people precisely because its so counter intuitive, because cause and effect don't have to happen in the order you're expecting. Because you look at the answer and your brain just nopes out.
Where did the book come from? It doesn't matter. It exists. Since it does exist, its not allowed to not exist without an outside force acting to change that. Everybody asks "where'd it come from?" as the intuitive question, and the answer is "Why wouldn't it be there?" Because Einstein says its not allowed to stop being there, and math always works both ways, so you can't ask where it came from without establishing where else it would be. And Newton says its not allowed to be anywhere else without a specific reason.
And 'you didn't put it there to enforce the time loop' isn't a reason. Newton says that attempt means it stays put.
- Location
- Here
How did we get fixated on Time Travel and Paradoxes?
Oh, right. Mind Flayers.
Which, like Time Loops and Paradoxes have not as of yet shown up in this story.
For the Mind Flyers, I simply assume they did not travel strait back in time, but also jumped dimensions. No Paradox involved.
So, can we perhaps get back on tract with this story? Perhaps by considering the reactions when a copper, one headed Ghidora shows up in town?
Oh, right. Mind Flayers.
Which, like Time Loops and Paradoxes have not as of yet shown up in this story.
For the Mind Flyers, I simply assume they did not travel strait back in time, but also jumped dimensions. No Paradox involved.
So, can we perhaps get back on tract with this story? Perhaps by considering the reactions when a copper, one headed Ghidora shows up in town?
- Location
- united states
fixed that for yah
They did that too.
It doesn't come up often, but Spell Jammer, and travel through deep Transitive Planes allowed for finding new Prime Material planes, that were distinct from the Crystal Sphere travel that was analogous to space travel.
In theory you could hop into the plane of Shadow in Faerun, travel deep enough, and then hop out into Greyhawk, or Ebberon, or Krynn, or Dark Sun (A place so fucked, its entire Pantheon just packed their bags and Noped out) or wherever.
In practice, none of that shit is mapped, so for one thing, good luck not getting hilariously lost, and for another strange things live that far out from the Prime Material, Strange even by the standards of people who live in D&D worlds. Old Sailors used to write 'here there be dragons' on maps leading to the unknown. A Dragon would be the least of your worries.
Only ever did one campaign where we did that, it gets messy, not all settings are created equal.
Napdragon
Fire from Heat
That's how you know you're in the Far Realm
- Location
- Somewhere, Maybe
You missed the entire point of the paradox. "Where the book came from" -is- the paradox, and if you say it doesn't matter, then congratulations, you turned your back on the entire point of the discussion already.
Even from an outside perspective, the personal timeline of the book IS A CIRCLE. it has no beginning, it has no end. If time is linear, than the book got buried in the past, dug up in the present, was used to build a one-use time machine that took it to the past, got buried in the past, got dug up in the future, and round and round and round it goes, FOREVER. That is the fate of a Djinn Particle: To be forever linked to this one timeloop and doomed to repeat it for literally infinite numbers of loops. It won't even get out of the loop due to the heat death of the universe, because the timeloop is stuck in a place where that isn't a thing yet.
Sorry to bring this up again, I just got up.