Illithids

[Adamaro]

Could you please point me to resources on Illithids. MM1 and some other MMs I know, but what about epic monsters, etc?

Anyway ... Illithid resources. Tnx.

[PinkysBrain]

Lords of Madness has some stuff.

[JeminiZero]

Psionic Illthid are in XPH. You might also want to look up the Voidmind template in MM3.

And maybe the link in my signature.

[AslanCross]

Monster Manual V has the Mind Flayers of Thoon, which are a cult of Illithids prospecting the Multiverse for Quintessence. They have a whole bunch of constructs that they use as soldiers, as well as a lower-level Elder Brain.

Lords of Madness has an extensive writeup regarding their origin, goals, etc. It has the Ulitharid (a kind of super-Illithid) and the CR 25 Elder Brain.

I believe there was also a free adventure ("The Flow of Fresh Brains") that has detailed stats on an Illithid Nautiloid (a giant snail-shaped spaceship).

[JoshuaZ]

In addition to what has been listed, Epic Handbook also has some relevant stuff, a handful of monsters related to them and a template or two. Complete Psionic has the Illithid heritage feats and an associated prestige class but you may need to adjust the fluff and some other stuff. The fluff as written doesn't make very much sense given Illithid reproduction and the editing of the associated PrC isn't great leaving some bits which just need to be ignored. The only really blatant major mechanical issue is that one part of the PrC refers to augmenting your mindblast but there's no class feature for such augments.

Edit: There's also some relevant stuff in one of the Ravenloft books but I don't remember which.

[The Tygre]

If you can find it, get your hands on a book called Unveiled Masters by Paradigm Press. An essential guide to Mind Flayers if there ever was one. Goes great with Plot & Poison by Green Ronin.

[NEO|Phyte]

The fluff as written doesn't make very much sense given Illithid reproduction and the editing of the associated PrC isn't great leaving some bits which just need to be ignored.
The simplest way to justify the fluff is with the illithid's established time-travel: You aren't the result of illithids breeding, you're a proto-illithid!

[Aik]

There's a 2E book called devoted to the topic called The Illithiad, which goes into a great deal of detail.

[Devils_Advocate]

The simplest way to justify the fluff is with the illithid's established time-travel: You aren't the result of illithids breeding, you're a proto-illithid!
But... by giving the illithid race the origin of appearing in the future via time travel, Lords of Madness made it so that they don't need non-illithid ancestors to evolve from or a creator deity or anything. They're their own ancestors, with their existence lacking any cause but violation of normal causality.

Anyway, Lords of Madness, being the aberrational counterpart to the "Races of" line of books, is the main source of information on mind flayers in 3.5. The Expanded Psionics Handbook gives you the rules for making them psionic, like they're supposed to be.

One interesting thing to note about illithids is their attitude towards death.

When an illithid dies, its brain is cast into its community's Elder Brain's pool, where it sinks to the bottom to be absorbed into the great cerebral mass of the Elder Brain. This results in a mental as well as a physical merging, but for the Elder Brain it isn't really that big of a deal, since It doesn't usually learn much from this that it doesn't know already. Its store of knowledge is truly immense to start with, and anything important that the illithid knew it probably already telepathically reported to It when it was alive.

To the illithid, though, this is a huge deal. Imagine gaining immense knowledge and understanding, the likes of which you cannot currently comprehend, after you die. Mind flayers can imagine no fate more glorious, and for them, this fate is a reality. For the merged entity created through this mental joining is the illithid, is its original mind, just with loads more added on.

Because in death they ultimately become the same entity, the illithids have great incentive to cooperate, and to obey the Elder Brain absolutely. You wouldn't want to wind up kicking yourself for acting against yourself back when you were separate individuals, would you? And the Elder Brain surely knows better than you how to further the interests of the gestalt entity that you will ultimately be; It's way smarter than you, knows a lot more, and has a lot more experience in this matter. The one worry is that you're the only one terribly concerned with ensuring that you join with Elder Brain. To you, that's the most important thing in the world, whereas to your fellow illithids and the Elder Brain, it doesn't matter quite so much. Still, they realize that about you, so they're going to avoid putting you in a situation where you need to betray them to guarantee your deserved apotheosis after death.

One more thing. This fantastic afterlife that I've outlined for mind flayers? It's... not entirely accurate. Oh, the Elder Brain absorbs deceased illithids' memories, all right... but not their personalities. It's not just a matter of a single illithid's particular persona being a drop in the proverbial ocean, contributing only trivially to the Elder Brain as a whole, to the sum of all the many that have gone before. It's that it doesn't contribute at all. Its personality isn't subsumed, it just doesn't survive to any degree.

The Elder Brains don't let the illithids know this, naturally. Were even a few mind flayers convinced to view death as something to be avoided, rather than their destined merging as a great reward, that could be... problematic. And They couldn't have that.

[Yora]

If no illithid ever knows about that last fact, it's even much more unlikely that player characters can get that knowledge. So why does it even appear in the book? That's one problem with 3rd Edition and what I love so much about Planescape. Don't explain everything, keep some mysteries to make the world more fascinating.

[Foryn Gilnith]

You seem to be assuming that "this fluff is written in Lords of Madness" has some correlation with "this fluff is true in the campaign setting I'm playing in".