While I generally agree that not everything needs to be drilled down to the tiniest details, I think "Why are they different?" deserves at least a bit more attention. The player character is being presented with choices about using illithid powers, and ultimately about becoming illithid. Knowing why the Emperor and Omeluum are the way they area informs us about our own character's likely fate, and thus is a factor to be weighed when making that decision (and notably, Omeluum does not identify as its previous form; it's just free from the elder brain's control, which I think is a more straightforward situation). The game sort of gets around this by having the Emperor prepare a special tadpole for us, which means we didn't have a typical transformation, either, but having more buildup about how and why he did that would welcome. For example, it seems like he might be interested in having more mindflayers *like him,* free from the control of elder brains, possibly as suggested in the Adversary idea above. He does clearly think he's an improvement over his old self, but he never really talks about the desire to make more people like him outside of thinking it'd improve the odds of defeating the Absolute. If this is an ongoing project of his, I'd like to know more about it. Not even from a "'give me a scientific dissertation on this"' perspective, but just more about what it means to him and for our character. I don't consider this aspect to be story-breaking if it's not there, but it seems like yet another place where I had questions that seemed reasonable to ask but really couldn't be addressed. Frankly, if I weren't already familiar with the idea of how arcane magic interacts with the illithid colonies, I probably would have wanted to ask more about that, too.
Ultimately, I think choosing ceremorphosis is a leap of faith. Trying to remove all the mystery of that process and change undercuts that. Lots of choices that characters make in media or literature come down to a leap of faith because it’s often a powerful storytelling moment.
The Emperor remembering the life of Balduran doesn't mean the Emperor identifies as Balduran. It's the player that assumes they're the same.
I’ve noticed a lot of players assume he sees himself as Balduran, even though during the Ansur quest he says it’s a name he once answered to (or something to that same effect). That’s just one example. There are other examples in which it’s clear he has left his old life and identity behind even though he still retains memories of his former life.
Of note, the Illithiad was a source book that TSR put out years ago. It was entirely about mind flayers, and it discussed the tendency for some mind flayers to have lingering connections to who their host used to be. Things like tapping fingers on a table thoughtlessly. When this was discovered in a mind flayer, it often led to the community enacting a death sentence. Thus, some mind flayers, when they realized this was happening to them, would attempt to hide it.
It's not an enormous jump to say that some mind flayers remember more and more of their host lives, and it's reasonable to assume that those memories might impact the illithid's behavior and personality.
Mind flayers have always been able to break away from the elder brain. Alhoons are notorious examples.
Thank you for this bit of info! I’ve seen others mention lore that supports the idea of a renegade illithid, but I’m not familiar enough with all the sources out there to know where to find that information.
