Quote Originally Posted by Tzardok View Post
Bunch of questions regarding Domains and Darklords, if you feel up for it.
Sure why not.

Any idea what the illithid god-brain did to become a darklord? Does this story I heard about a human psion posesseing the brain and betraying his people hold water?
We still have no concrete answer, but my best two conjectures:

• The god-brain was the elder brain who concocted and disseminated the lie about illithids becoming one with elder brains in death.
• The god-brain is not an illithid elder brain at all, but rather as you mentioned the product of a humanoid psion betraying his people to mind flayers in exchange for power. This one came from a fan-written netbook but is not a bad idea.

I favor the first one because it constitutes a hypocritical crime against mind flayers themselves, which is a pretty big lunge for them. The God-Brain desired to be above all rivals and to gather information and knowledge to itself more quickly, wanting all knowledge within itself. To attain these desires it created and distributed a falsehood, causing the loss of knowledge of how to create new elder brains (thus endangering the illithid species) and a mass psychic suicide as many illithids logically reasoned that with all the intelligence already possessed by the God-Brain, to merge with it would be to instantly acquire all of its knowledge, so why bother remaining an ignorant little drone? The God-Brain's own followers, effectively its instruments of communication and interaction with the outside world, extinguished themselves in service to the Great Lie. Alone in the darkness, it sank into the Mists and got exactly what it wanted - a realm where it alone is supreme and where it can know absolutely everything - because it is limited, bounded, all that is to be known already long since discovered. The God-Brain rules a realm of nothing, psychic storms lashing out with its frustrations at being confined and unable to meaningfully grow in knowledge, with nothing do to but command and be opposed by its own agents.

What is the deal with the Nightmare Lands?
They're an Island of Terror, formerly part of the Core, where dreamlike entities exist and can terrorize "wanderers," those who are awake within the Lands. Uniquely for part of the Demiplane of Dread, they have a greater connection to the Region of Dreams, much in the same way that parts of the demiplane have a stronger connection to the Plane of Shadow. The mechanics of dreamscapes are not natively compatible with the structure of the Demiplane of Dread, which results in the domain demonstrating substantial instability.

What can you tell me about the Nightmare Court, where it comes from and how it came to be the Nightmare Lands' collective darklord?
We know very little about the nature of the Court. One proposition, which I believe to be essentially true, is that all of the members of the Court are just fragments of a single darklord, the Nightmare Man. Each of them may have originally been a unique entity, or they may all have been embodied in one original source entity who splintered as part of its torment.

The Court comprises six known members, plus a seventh not known to Dr. Illhousen but directly connected to them.

• The Nightmare Man, a faceless spectre who oversees the Nightmare Court and the Nightmare Lands but does not directly modify dreamscapes;
• The Ghostly Dancer, a mute ballerina associated with grief;
• "Morpheus," a red-skinned man associated with confusion and instability;
• "Hypnos," a suit-wearing gentleman in a glass coffin associated with frustration and impotence;
• Mullonga, a witch associated with fear;
• The Rainbow Serpent, a winged snake associated with betrayal;
• The Redheaded Child, who is unknown to Dr. Illhousen but has manifested on Gothic Earth and is associated with loss of innocence.

Each possess a vast array of powers within the Nightmare Lands, are served by malefic dream entities, and are anchored to a mystical "Web of Dreams" that lets them feel dreamers and feed on their negative emotions, with each connected via a specific mystical relic that if destroyed would sever their link to the web.

Spoiler: My guess
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My guess is that the Nightmare Man was once a would-be artist who struggled to capture emotion in his works because he had never experienced strong and passionate feelings, ever since an incident as a child left him numb to the world and desperate to recapture the spark he lost. He found himself incapable of experiencing them through contact with others and developed a subdued but malicious envy for those who could experience so very easily what he struggled to feel, let alone to depict. To attain his desires, he made a deal with a powerful witch, whose price was that he would "experience fear like no other before," which struck him as a price he would be comfortable paying. She gave him the means to absorb the souls of others, and he betrayed her by testing it on her first. After taking the souls of a dancer who knew only grief, a fastidious and apparently successful man immersed in frustration, and a chaotic man who despised order and structure but could only find confusion when it was stripped away, the would-be darklord found himself alone on a misty road with a red-haired child, the picture of innocence and bright potential. This would be his freedom, he decided, and he stole the child's soul with the power the witch had granted him... only to discover that the Mists had delivered him to the moment that started his own torment. The Nightmare Man's hollowness and lack of emotion was the result of him stealing from himself as a child, and all he could capture from the moment was the feel of lost innocence. Unable to recognize his own self as either child or man and knowing only that he had sown the seeds of his own destruction, he fled into the Mists and emerged into a realm made just for him, a realm in which each of his stolen souls - including the witch's familiar, who represented his betrayal of both himself and her - manifested as co-regents, each with their own hungers. The Nightmare Man has been reduced to nothing more than a malevolent will that animates the hundreds of spiders who weave his cloak and let him imagine himself to be something other than a hollow void.

And he experiences fear like no other before - only as an observer, incapable of harnessing it himself except to give to others, never able to capture it except as a mirror of another's emotions, and unable to channel it into his art because his paint turns to blood. He is the master puppeteer behind the architects of a thousand thousand nightmares and none of them will ever belong to him.


Is known when the Nightmare Lands formed?
No.

Is it true that the Sea of Sorrows didn't have a darklord before the Great Conjunction? How is that possible and how could it have been formed?
The Sea was not necessarily a domain as a whole before the darklord appeared - it would have existed as the sea of many other domains, and any experience of sailing through it to reach another would have been due to the Mists. The domain he plies, after all, does not incorporate coastal waters.

How did Jack Karn, Baron Lyron Ebonsong and Althea become darklords of their respective domains (respectively Ferelle, Liffe and the island of Demise)?
Just gonna ask me to make up more stuff for their underdeveloped slacker corners, are you? You know perfectly well that none of these were ever substantially detailed in canon.

Is known when the Isle of Ravens came into the Mists?
No.

Edit: Do you think this Drowning Deep domain is a worthy inclusion.
Nope.