Elder Brain

Image credit WOTC

### Languages

Understands Common, Deep Speech, and Undercommon but can’t speak, telepathy 5 miles

## Scouting Report

### Special Notes

Telepathic

The ultimate expression of illithid domination, an elder brain sprawls within a vat of viscous brine, touching the thoughts of creatures near and far. It scrawls upon the canvas of their minds, rewriting their thoughts and authoring their dreams.

***Psychic Infiltrators.*** When an elder brain infiltrates a mind, it alters the creature’s perception and deceives its senses, causing it to see, hear, touch, taste, or feel reality according to the elder brain’s intent. From across great distances, it implants subconscious suggestions or subtly influences dreams to compel creatures toward a course of action that benefits its grand plan.

When its insidious suggestions fail to take hold, an elder brain asserts its dominance more directly. It seizes control of a resistant mind and controls the creature’s body as it would a puppet. Against the rare, strong-willed stalwart that defies it or attacks it, an elder brain sends a blast of overwhelming psychic force to crush the upstart’s mind, rendering the creature a thoughtless, drooling shell.

***Devourer of Thoughts.*** An elder brain sustains itself by consuming the brains of other creatures. When the mind flayer servants that guard and tend to an elder brain don’t bring its meals directly to it, the elder brain reaches out with tendrils of thought, mentally compelling creatures to come to it so that it may feed upon them.

When a mind flayer perishes, the elder brain’s servants feed the contents of its skull to their master, which absorbs the illithid’s brain and all the knowledge and experience contained therein. In this way the elder brain continually increases its knowledge, uniting the thoughts and experiences of the illithid colony into a unified whole. Mind flayers conceive of this “oneness” as a sacred state in the same way that a worshiper of a human deity might view an eternal afterlife in the heavens—for an elder brain can evoke the persona of any illithid it has ever absorbed.

***Hive Mind.*** Non-illithids call this creature an elder brain because it acts as the central communication hub for an entire mind flayer colony just as a brain does for a living body. Linked to the elder brain, the colony acts like a single organism, acting in concert as if each illithid were the digit of a hand.

***Ego Unhindered.*** Each elder brain considers itself and its desires the most important things in the multiverse, the mind flayers in its colony nothing more than extensions of its will. But no two elder brains are alike, and each presides over its colony according to its own unique personality and storehouse of collected knowledge and experience. Some elder brains reign as domineering tyrants, while others serve more benignly as sages, counselors, and repositories of information and lore for the mind flayers that protect and nourish them.

The ambitions of an elder brain are always tempered by its relative immobility. Although its telepathic senses can reach for miles, moving anywhere is always a dangerous proposition. If forced outside its brine pool, an elder brain will swiftly expire, and transporting an elder brain in its pool through confining and tortuous subterranean tunnels frequently proves difficult or impossible.

## An Elder Brain’s Lair

The lair of an elder brain always lies deep in the heart of a mind flayer colony. The creature dwells in a dimly glowing brine pool, filled with foul and brackish water infused with the elder brain’s vital fluids and with psionic energy.