Mind Flayers and magic aren't supposed to mix, but the rare illithid outcast can achieve true lichdom. Get the full stat block for Itzigratz the Illithid Lich here: https://scintilla.studio/monster-05-itzigratz-illithid-lich-bryan-holmes

Support the show: https://www.patreon.com/scintillastudio

Join the conversation: https://twitter.com/sparkotter

Meet the guest:

Forgotten Realms expert and best-selling DM's Guild creator Bryan Holmes brings a proper Illithid Lich to the show, and asks how much responsibility do we have to stop bad things before they happen.

https://twitter.com/FallenWyvern

Music from Jason Shaw at Audionautix: https://audionautix.com/

You realize that you've gone too far when the walls start

glowing with purple light from mosses and funguses that are so far below the

ground, they're not getting sunlight.

You might be following along in a tunnel, you think you're going the right way

and an umber hulk five minutes ahead of you has already, reshifted all these

tunnels and you're just going in circles and now you don't have a way back out.

Welcome to the Underdark.

I'm Lucas and this is Making a Monster, the show where game designers show us

their favorite monster, how it works, why it works, and what it means.

This week, our guide through this fungal hellscape is Bryan Holmes, an expert on

the Forgotten Realms setting who publishes adventures and tools for Dungeons and

dragons on the DM's Guild, a digital storefront for user-created content.

Most of my content is taking something that exists in D and D's

lore and bringing it to fifth edition.

I do the kneel shy for the Elvin kingdoms, but I didn't invent that creature.

I brought the Oberth spec for blood war beast, Harry.

But they existed in earlier additions.

There's the El home, but that's kind of a different creature.

Those are like our cutis who cheated death.

The monster he brought to the show is a marvelous subversion

of this Lich lore, rich lore.

No, the floor works

the way I've been pronouncing.

It was, it's a grants, but we've been just calling them it's.

This is a proper illiterate Lich.

If you haven't played Dungeons and dragons, those two words might sound

like so much nonsense, but if you have, they're genuinely terrifying as to why,

well, maybe I should just show you.

Pack your torches and your 10-foot poles everyone, we're going monster hunting.

So to come across him, first of all, you're going

to have to enter his lair.

And to do that, you're going to have to go down below.

Way down below .To a place so uniquely Dungeons and Dragons, you might know

it as the Upside Down - the horrifying subterranean world of mushrooms,

mildew, and monsters, where nothing is as it seems - the Underdark.

The idea of the Underdark is always this - it's a constantly

changing, shifting maze of tunnels.

And if you look at a map of the Underdark, it's never going to be useful.

It'll tell you, "Hey, there's a city over here."

But it's never going to tell you how to get there.

Cause it's just cavern after cavern, there's no light.

The creatures that live down there are perfectly suited to living down there

and they have to contend with things like mind flayers and even beholders

- very, very dangerous creatures.

If a singular version of that creature can't take out a mind flayer, chances are

it lives in a society like the Duergar.

They live underground and they have to form these fortress

cities to hold back that evil.

Those cities might also belong to the Drow, gray skinned,

subterranean cousins of the elves, or the deep gnomes called Svirfneblin.

Often though those cities aren't enough to stop the mind flayers.

Illithids are their proper name, but mind flayers

are what most people call them.

A mind flayer is already a creature that's beyond reason.

It's from an alien plane and it can just walk into your mind.

That's in and of itself terrifying.

You don't have secrets.

There's no, "Oh yeah, you know, I know what this item does.

I know that."

They just, they know and they're extremely intelligent.

Worse, anything, one of them knows, they all know.

All mind flayers are connected to a single mind called the Elder

Brain, and the raw mental energy of this connection is called psionics.

And the Elder Brain that is their hive mind hates magic.

So what if Brian asked, one illithid desired secrets of power

only found in arcane wizardry?

Secrets so great they could never be learned in a single lifetime?

It might perform a ritual of ultimate blasphemy, sacrifice its body and

trap its own soul in a phylactery to become the greatest and most

a lich.

For a illithid lich to exist.

it's sort of an abomination even in their own culture.

So was born Itzigratz.

When he first became, he took it out of the quality of mind players that he

wants to belong to, but their colony didn't exist close to any food source.

So he took the layer of an ancient drowned city that had fallen to a calamity.

So it's a, it's a ghost city and it's both literally and figurative cause

there are drought, ghosts everywhere.

And so we started seeding rumors that.

The city had been found cause it was considered lost.

And so drought would continuously send out raiding parties and that gave him

a good fuel source for his phylactery.

But as he killed them, he learned how to control their souls.

Mechanically, Itzigratz is a top-tier monster with a challenge rating of 22.

The whole point was to try and give, uh, give DMS a

monster for those groups that just feel like nothing can stop them.

Because it's a mythic encounter when you've got him on the ropes, when you

get him down to zero hit points, he pulls out - the mind flayer colony he used to

belong to head three Alhoons, and they had a weird stone that was their phylactery

- he smashes it and all the ghosts that are with him become mind flayer ghosts.

His mythic actions are the Elder Brain, the Alhoons and the

Illithids that he took the souls of.

And so the second half of his fight becomes you battling his old colony

Mythic encounters you may remember from our episode

on the Warforged Colossus.

So with mythic encounters, we were dealing with these creatures

that were basically boss monsters.

You hit zero hit points, they get a new pool of hit points, and they

become an even more fearsome thing.

And I had made a black dragon Malisor Rex, who he was the dragon from Dragonspear

Castle, an older module, and when he triggered his mythic, he got six legendary

actions and he just went all out.

Like a dragon that's got seven actions per turn is a lot.

And I thought, well, that's cool, but that's physical.

What would happen if you took a completely cerebral creature, a

creature used to controlling the battlefield and gave them seven actions.

It has magic spells, a huge repertoire - it's an 18th-level spellcaster.

If your players are prepared to fight a lich, it should be able to take

this on for the first form, because Lynch's are one of the top three, like.

If you're going to face something, that's where you're going to die.

Like dragons, lunches and demons is legendary actions.

Allow it to cast more spells, but just the first, second and third double

spells or a whole crap load can trips.

So most groups that are at that level shouldn't have too

much trouble with those spells.

Like if it runs out of spell slots, I'm going to be as tough as he was before.

Once his mythic gets in.

He gets more reclass because go, sir, protecting him.

So it's AC goes out and he's a lot harder to hit.

Six mythic actions means those go seller random are able to just sort of fly

through and attack the PCs as they're trying to kill this guy, mind players, and

just both don't have too many hit points.

So the small pool of hit points.

That's kind of, you, you want to hit them hard and hit them fast.

Otherwise this guy's taking you down, aside from the mechanics of this, uh,

and aside from the, you know, this being one of the big three, what do you

want players to feel in this terrified?

Anything intelligent?

And the game should be kind of terrifying because the DM can just

say, Oh no, they're too smart for that.

This is the plot they pulled.

Right.

So as a player, you kind of want to be on it, your toes.

And then again, that spell casting, that hammers you hard and seven actions.

That's a lot of spells.

Hopefully your players have heard about him.

Yeah, I see him.

I mean, they're all genderless.

So it, hopefully they've heard about it's hopefully they've prepared.

They understand what it means to go against the mind player in a Lynch.

And then once they go in there, they just hope for the best, a

smart creature like this, you know, always have a plan in our book.

We did not give any particular, Hey, this is what they're doing,

but they have their ideals.

So yeah, he kind of wants to be left alone to grow in power.

So what did, what happens to your players?

If you just let that power fester, they could leave him alone and he'd be happy

to say, okay, goodbye, just leave.

And he would be okay with that.

But then you know, that there's this pit of evil, just growing under your feet.

And eventually he's not going to be content with just sitting still.

So that's kind of terrifying if it's one of those, if you

don't take care of it now.

So this is a question of, uh, Responsibility then

it doesn't carry with it.

Yeah.

A lot of 'em in like the more gray area, moral choices, like,

Hey, we killed a bunch of goblins.

Here's their children.

What do we do?

He's lived a very long life and he's going to continue harvesting souls

until someone eventually stops him.

And if it's not the drought, it's going to be someone else.

When that food source runs low, it's just like a dragon.

He comes in like a force of nature.

There's going to be a lot of players who don't have a problem with it,

but he's going to start buying.

Finishing where he is.

He's going to consume as many droughts come his way.

They're not a particularly populated race.

So eventually they're gonna have a problem with him as in more and more,

and he's going to cut them down and it's going to create a power vacuum.

So your players walk away drunk, continue to do this.

If the drown deplete themselves to bear are going to try and move in

on their territory, it's going to upset that balance under their feet.

And there's going to be.

And under drug war that would start the rippling effects of

letting something like this fester.

It would affect a lot of souls.

Maybe you have friends in the underdog.

Like, like I said, the spear Nebula and the deep gnomes, they would

definitely get caught up in it.

If you played out at the abyss, which you said you did, that, you

get to the one of my favorite parts.

I love my cones.

They're like my favorite creature.

I would hate to see harmony come to them, which is what would

happen again if this, this.

For us was at least.

And that's not to mention that it's a creature that once arcane secrets.

So if we're talking favor rune, it's wondering the underdark

maybe he gets bored and starts going towards the entourage desert

there's Sharyn trapped under there.

Another horrifying abomination.

It can tap into, into these elder evils that existed in the world.

Just because it's a board.

If you want something a little more personal, it attacked

its own quiet player colony.

Well, if survivors happen, do they know that they can't take it on without help?

So having bind players come to you, asking for assistance could be a

really interesting way to just flip that on its head, I guess is Brian

homes forgotten realms, expert and game designer on the DMS Guild.

Thanks for listening to making a monster.

If you like this story and you want, it's a grads in your D and

D game, Brian has made available Holy grail of podcasts extras.

You can download the full stat block for it.

That's everything you need to run.

This encounter from the Joe's website is scintilla.studio/monster that's

S C I N T I L L a.studio/monster.

You can also support Brian on the DMS Guild by checking out this recent

project where it's aggressive peers, mythic encounters, your honors was a

book that I worked on with Steve Fiddler and here at Jordan, go check them out.

They're fantastic.

People.

The book is a lot of fun if you like the idea of bits, but

you don't like mind players.

There's 35 other creatures in there to have fun with.

The realms is my sandbox.

All my content is almost ubiquitous.

It created for that first that's sort of the context at which I build all my

material because I like the good story.

I know that kind of sounds cheesy D and D is all about

story, but I like a good story.

And so the realms is full of little narrative threads to pull from.

So the DMS Guild, you search Brian Holmes and you'll find all my stuff.

There's also a whole lot of content there.

That's not find that's really good too.

So as far as getting a hold of me, Twitter, That's usually the best

place it's fallen women, all one word.

So falling like something that has fallen in Woodburn, like the

monster, you can let them know.

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I'll see you next week or the deep gnomes called this nibbling