Originally Posted by doubledeviant
I don't think the Emperor can be meaningfully improved without addressing Larian's fundamental misunderstanding of ceremorphosis.


From one of my other posts: "Barring some unmentioned magical intervention, the adventurer is dead, and the Emperor is either deceiving itself or telling the most obvious lie in the history of the realms."

The tadpole eats the brain, absorbs some of the host's knowledge, attaches itself to the brain stem, and rewrites the host's body into an illithid form.

If the Emperor is deluded - thinking itself to actually be the human it killed - the story should acknowledge the situation. Perhaps it could add another dimension to the horror. Or perhaps helping to reconcile the Emperor to the truth of its existence could profoundly change its character (for better or worse).

And if the Emperor is instead attempting to deceive the characters... I don't know how to save that scenario. The lie is too obvious. Even if we assume the player party is ignorant of the exact physical process (including Lae'zel and Gale despite their relevant experience), the scenario must somehow be interesting enough for a player who knows the lore to enjoy (role)playing along as their manipulated character is led to their doom.

Perhaps the Emperor could argue that the Githyanki and everyone else are wrong about how ceremorphosis works. Perhaps even offer to perform a gruesome autopsy of a dead illithid to show an intact brain melded with a tadpole (if an explicit retcon of the lore is desired).

The bare minimum for improvement would be for the party to actually talk about the Emperor's highly controversial claims among themselves. Seriously.

All of this matters beyond fidelity to source material: The Emperor's claims drastically alter the nature of the player character's impending fate - whether it's a matter of death or transformation.

There's also a "meta" problem to consider: If the game is going to replace my custom-made Dream Guardian (think Minthara but way hotter) with a pushy squid-man, the resulting scenario needs to be *VERY* interesting else it will simply be annoying. Which it currently is. As a player, I went from perking up and paying attention when the Dream Guardian spoke to wishing Omeluum's ring actually worked and silenced the Emperor.

A lot of people have brought up the lore of illithids, but I don�t think that�s actually as big of an issue as it sounds when you consider a couple of things. There�s apparently something called an �Adversary� which is an illithid that retains much of its former self in their new body. Also, back in, I think 2020, DnD lore changed pretty dramatically in that no race in the DnD world is inherently evil. I don�t think it�s much of a stretch at that point to have a scenario in which someone is transformed into an illithid and through absorbing the host�s knowledge leaves some of their former selves in tact. I don�t think that makes transformation less scary for most people. Turning into an illithid still changes you in ways you probably can�t fully comprehend until it�s experienced, you�re left vulnerable to enthrallment by an elderbrain, you can no longer live a normal life or walk openly in society, and now you have to feed on brains to survive. Not to mention, attachment to your physical self is very real and a lot of that gets projected on to the characters we play.

As for the ��meta� problem,� I think no matter how interesting The Emperor is, there are always going to be a good number of people who are salty about having their hot guardian turn out to be a squid man. He�s also a potential romance, and I�ve explained in another post that monster romances, while quite popular, have two target audiences: women and queer people, and not everyone in those groups would be interested because interests vary among individuals. This puts his romance into a smaller minority of players.

Last edited by LittleMonday; 13/01/24 09:59 PM. Reason: Word choice