Re: Just how big is "known space"?

From: "Adam Miller" <night_druid3000@?????.com>
Sent: Wednesday, November 07, 2007 10:18 AM
Subject: Re: [SPELLJAMMER] Just how big is "known space"?


> --- Ben Wafer <bwafer@????.ca> wrote:
>
>> [Ben Wafer] Wait, what? Are you sure about that
>> Adam? I thought the sphere-and-plane-spanning
>> illithid empire was way older than that. The
>> Illithiad has this to say about the collapse of the
>> illithid empire: "In truth, the illithid loss was
>> so great, that the mind flayers have not fully
>> recovered from it, even millennia later." To me that
>> places the fall of the illithid empire a minimum of
>> 2,000 years ago (probably longer), which means
>> that they must have popped up quite a bit earlier
>> than that in order to build their massive empire
>> in the first place. In fact, the Illithiad
>> doesn't give any sort of firm timeline for the rise
>> of the illithids, but it does include a couple of
>> in-universe sources that imply that they've been
>> around almost as long as elves.
>
> Lords of Madness places the illithid empire in the
> distant future, and according to the "Astronumdi
> Chronicles" (or somesuch thing), the empire was being
> crushed, so they fled back in time to 2,000 years ago
> to recover.  Flying in the face of much canon that has
> illithids long before that, such as many FR
> entries...:p
>
> Can't say I'm really sold on the idea, personally.  It
> flies in the face of too much canon to be believable.

Maybe the Astromundi Chronicles is only talking about one part of the 
illithid race. You could stick with the FR-related information about mind 
flayers, and add in a bunch of time travellers who come back in time and try 
to alter the timeline so that their race becomes more powerful than it 
originally was.

Maybe the time-travelling illithids could work behind the scenes, finding 
important mind-flayer from history and telepathically giving them a boost, 
so that they invent the Nautiloid 20 years earlier or whatever. It might be 
fun for the future illithids to kill off the elder brains of the past and 
replace them with their own ones.

Maybe the time-travelling mind flayers have to work really really carefully 
to avoid accidentally killing off their own ancestors. (It would be great 
fun to have a PC kill a single mind-flayer and then have several more pop 
out of existence!)

David "Big Mac" Shepheard
Virtual Eclipse Role Playing Club
http://uk.groups.yahoo.com/group/virtualeclipselrp/links/d20_system_001071937434/Spelljammer_001071430476
http://spelljammer.wikia.com/
http://www32.brinkster.com/virtualeclipse/