Lords Of Madness - Mind Flayers from the Future

The problem isn't when the illithids came from, the length of the illithid empire, or the time it took for the gith forerunners to evolve. The problem is the Vlaakiths, who are a stable, unbroken lineage of 157 queens, one of which has ruled for 1000 years herself. Vlaakith I was crowned some time after Gith's rebellion, which means all this happened in the present chronology, not the future.

2000-1000/156=6.4102564102564102564102564102564, which means the average reign of a githyanki queen is slightly less than six and a half years. This is obviously ridiculous (I don't think it's possible for the queens to breed fast enough to replace themselves at that rate), contradicts the statements in the Monster Manual and the Planar Handbook that Gith rebelled "aeons" ago, and contradicts the text in the Illithiad and A Guide to the Astral Plane that the illithid empire was "before the crowning of Ra, when the Outer Planes were still in flux, when there were still beings who remembered the creation of then-bejeweled Sigil..."

I'm fine with the idea that mind flayers came from the future, and I also enjoyed Zadara's article. They might well have brought their gith forerunner thralls along with them, too (although that contradicts Dungeon #100's version of gith origins). But it happened a lot longer than 2000 years ago.

I think Lords of Madness was trying to differentiate illithids from aboleths, who it established as the unthinkably ancient aberration race. It made sense to make them comparatively recent, then. Illithids don't have to be millions of years old like the aboleths apparently are; they just have to be old enough so that the line of githyanki rulers makes sense. A githyanki generation is 40 years - that's 7240 years at minimum if young queens are going to get old enough to have children of their own. Now figure in the fact that old queens don't age or need to eat (so they can't be poisoned), and the presence of their fanatical bodyguards, and it's going to be very difficult to get rid of them. Each could have ruled for hundreds of years, though none have ruled as long as the Lich-Queen. Even assuming that each time a queen finally dies there's a civil war where many queens are killed in succession (although that doesn't fit with what we know about the githyanki), I think 20,000 years is a conservative estimate.

There are a lot of problems with the timeline. Like the illithids origin and the githzerai origin.

1. Illithids had an empire in the far future ruling over pre-gith forerunners and grimlocks, which rebelled and forced the illithids to sacrifice their god-brains and travel back in time.

2. Some recently freed from enslavement githzerai went into portals between Limbo and the Far Realm to fight, where they were infested with neothelid larvae, which matured into the first mindflayers, which came to the multiverse through time-space portals earlier than when their hosts actually left and then enslaved the forerunners for the first/second time.

3. Humans (known as Forerunners) living on Pharagos were enslaved by illithids twice, rebelled and sent the illithids back, were re-enslaved and became the gith races in the second and earlier timeline.

Think that over. There must be numerous time-space portals and paradoxes for the illithids and the gith to exist as they do. Does anyone else see problems when comparing all the different sources?

Even so, that puts the rebellion at more or less the same time as they were hurled back in time, which means Vlaakith I would have been crowned after they were in our past - which still means there's 157 generations of Vlaakiths in the present timeline. The only way around that is to say that the githyanki ruled for thousands of years in the future before finally joining the illithids in the past without realizing it.

Also, note the pact between Gith and Ephelomon, which happened after the rebellion but before the crowning of Vlaakith I. This pact must have been in the past (it's doubtful that Tiamat would honor a pact that hasn't been made yet).

Plus at a history count of 2000 - then that means there's some elves still hanging around that remember the illithid Empire on a personal level. 2000 is maybe, 2 elven lifespans? Maybe?

So roughly the equilivant of a century maybe? Still - aweful short for an acient empire. It's just one more reason to push it back to 20.000

The Old Ones are said to have created the multiverse, so you should push them before the multiverse's beginning and the aboleths.

(Especially if the aboleth Elder Evils are draedens, since the draedens are creations of the Old Ones)

heh, and where does Ao fit into all this?

-420