Resurrecting/Healing a Mind Flayer's victim?

[Dr_Dinosaur]

If a mind flayer reduces a character to 0 INT but doesn't get the chance to kill them afterward, will magic that restores ability damage work on the victim? It seems odd if it does, since the damage is meant to reflect the brain matter being scooped out and one doesn't normally think of the Restoration line of spells as fixing physical harm like that.

If not, or if I missed text stating that their ability to devour brains auto-kills at 0 INT, how can a victim be saved if most resurrection magic requires a full corpse and won't undo INT damage?

[tyckspoon]

3.5 Mind Flayers do not do ability damage; they grapple you with their tentacles, and if you let them get all four on they eat your brain and kill you. Character is just normally dead, and can be raised by anything that would repair the missing brain. Methinks you have this posted to the wrong subforum, or possibly are using a non-standard stat block for your mind flayers.

[Kelb_Panthera]

Mind flayers don't do int damage. If they get a lock with all 4 tentacles, the brain gets slurped all at once.

Maybe you're asking about the process of ceremorphosis?

[Psyren]

1) Lords of Madness pg 63 provides all the detail around stopping Ceremorphosis that you need. Paraphrasing - you can restore their Int at any point before it reaches zero, but the tadpole is still alive so their ability scores will continue to be drained at a rate of 1/hour to each listed score (all mental + Dex). Once it hits zero, yes, the individual is dead (mentally replaced by the tadpole) rather than merely comatose.

The only way to kill the tadpole with no harm to the victim is Heal (the spell, not the skill), which of course means Wish and Miracle can do it too. If you don't have access to that, you have to keep restoring them until you do, or else crush their head. Obviously that option is drastic, but if you have resurrection handy then you can undo the damage.

2) Related to the above, only Raise Dead needs an intact corpse. Resurrection can bring you back even from fragments (so a mere crushed head is no issue), and True Resurrection can recreate you from nothing at all.

[Dr_Dinosaur]

Turns out we'd been using an unnoficial Pathfinder conversion that apparently took some liberties. I'll be sure to inform my DM.