Undead vs. Abberations (Campaign Setting Concept)

[karmuno]

I was reading through the world building articles on this site (again) and I started to develop this setting. I haven't really started to stat anything yet, and it's mostly in the conceptual stage (I have about five typed pages of inspired creativity). Tell me what you think:

Long ago, there was a galaxy-spanning civilization of mind flayers. Recently, however, they have been weakened severely by a race of undead (I haven't yet decided what these creatures will be, yet). The two races were created by two different pantheons (One, the "upper" created undead to do their bidding, the "lower" created abberations for theirs). The only way for the pantheons to interact is through their creations and spells they grant their followers.
The world which I am developing was created by the mind flayers to serve as a farm world to fuel their intergalactic war. As such its history has been altered a great deal by the aberrations. All of the major countries in the world are ruled by "marvas," a psychic race created to be representatives of the mind flayers. All of the major races were created via experimentation, and several were "discarded" when they proved useless (the dwarves are one example of this, and as a result they fled underground... literally). Basically every single inhabitant of the world is a lab mouse to the mind flayers.

I have a lot more than this, and I have some interesting ideas about magic and religion that I can post later (when I have enough energy to make my post moderately legible). Feedback on this (so far scant) idea would be highly appreciated.

[Matthew]

Is this Inter Galactic War going to take place in the context of Spell Jammer or is it going to be an Inter Planar War in the context of Plane Scape or something else entirely? A localised Spell Jamming War would be cool, in my opinion.

[karmuno]

I haven't read a lot of Spelljammer material, so I don't really know how closely it would resemble that. My idea though is that the mind flayers are involved in this war that the general population really knows absolutely nothing about. They don't even know how close the enemy is. It's kind of like 1984. It's not really interplanar though, as in this world planar travel is pretty restricted.

There is also a "side war" going on on the planet itself, also, between aberrations and undead. In my world, the dwarves are really separate from other races and have relatively little to do with the mind flayers, so they are influenced by the upper pantheon (who created undead). Thus there are a lot of dwarven priests who can turn abberations (you can turn either undead or aberrations, depending on which pantheon you worship). Both the undead and abberations appear equally "evil" to the majority of the populace because they require human life to breed (I'm altering the monsters a bit so that all aberrations/undead require a human host to create a second full-grown being). The citizens would greatly like to be rid of the aberrations.

However, you never know whether the undead are just as oppressive, if not moreso. Either way, the people really have no way of turning the tide in the galactic war except for serving their masters, as any rebellion will inevitably be crushed, even if not immediately. It appears that the war will never end, at least in the lifetime of this planet (I have not named it yet, and it gets kind of frustrating).