Dungeons & Dragons has long featured horrifying monsters, and that was only expanded by Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft. One of its most terrifying additions is an even more twisted and predatory variant of the already frightening mind flayers. Also known as illithids, mind flayers are a fan-favorite enemy and a classic D&D monster.
Mind flayers are among the most evil and alien entities in all the realms, and they have been spreading misery for millennia. With tentacles jutting from their faces and a ravenous appetite for brains, mind flayers are the stuff of Lovecraftian nightmares -- and Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft just made them even scarier.
These aberrations were created by Gary Gygax and have been part of Dungeons & Dragons from the very beginning. Within the lore, they are said to have governed an empire in the Far Realm millennia ago, conducting monstrous experiments and cruelly ruling over slave races, the most famous of which was the Gith. After the Gith rose up and overthrew their masters, the mind flayers invaded the material planes, building nests in the Underdark and enslaving other races such as the duergar, svirfneblin and kuo-toa.
Mind flayers feed on the brains of their victims and control them through the use of psionic powers. Interestingly, they are not conventional biological creatures that reproduce organically. Instead, mind flayers live in colonies and are ruled over by a massive sentient pool of briny liquid called an elder brain. This elder brain produces tiny tadpoles, and when a tadpole is put into a humanoid, the host body transforms and becomes another mind flayer. With psychic powers, alien physiology, the ability to turn anyone into another mind flayer against their will and the voracious desire to slurp people's cerebellum up in their tentacled mouths, it's no surprise that these beings have become symbols of abject horror.
That is why they fit perfectly in Van Richten's Guide to Ravenloft, which is not just one of the best horror supplements for D&D, but for any role-playing game currently in print. Van Richten's Guide includes a number of different settings known as the Domains of Dread, each of which is ruled over by a Darklord and designed for a different horror subgenre. One Domain is Bluetspur, a continent pocked with the ruins of dead civilizations where gaseous storms blast through hooked peaks of pulsating tumorous mountains.
Below the scarred surface, mind flayers live in a labyrinthine bivouac of a city. Miles below that is the Chamber of the God-Brain, where a powerful elder brain resides. However, this brain has become corrupted and diseased as a result of cannibalizing the illithids who served it and using its psionic powers to try to alter reality. In its desperation, it created a new horror: vampiric mind flayers.
The elder brain on Bluetspur infected its tadpoles with vampirism, then implanted these into humanoid victims. The vampiric mind flayers drain the brain fluids of those they feed upon, rather than eating the brains outright. They are twisted ghoulish abominations, aberrant even to other mind flayers. Having the usual vampiric weakness to sunlight makes them a little more vulnerable than other illithids, but that does not make them less dangerous, and their writhing unnatural bodies makes them even more horrifying to encounter in the dark.
Plus, like the rest of their kind, vampiric mind flayers possess terrifying psychic abilities. They can also crawl spider-like across the walls and do not need to sleep, breathe or eat. Still, they hunger, and are eager to unfurl their tentacles and pull their next victim skull-first into their voracious mouths -- a fate that seems even more terrifying than being attacked by a regular mind flayer.
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