Originally Posted by LittleMonday
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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 problem here is that the story presents us with someone who is entirely capable of explaining to us what is going on and what would happen, and has no reason not to explain it to us. It's not that the information isn't out there, our character just isn't able to ask it. Which undermines the leap of faith idea. Now it's not players making a leap, it's players being denied knowledge they should logically be able to get. We get several conversations with the Emperor, several opportunities to ask about the nature of his transformation and how he is the way he is. We just aren't ever allowed to. That's not mystery, that's frustration.