Hey all! I have this concept I'm trying to build on to throw at my players. There's a pirate crew led by an Ilithid/ mindflayer. My idea was to have this Ilithid be an exile from his former hivemind, and he came to the surface and eventually formed a pirate crew. He uses his superior mind abilities and powers to keep his crew in check, and he feeds on the brains of captured sailors they attack. I want to scale his powers down a bit, considering he is no longer part of the hive mind, and maybe twist some of his abilities around. So how would my fellow dungeon masters go about building this baddie?

Thanks in advance!

How much toned down do you need? What level is the party?

The party is all level 5, there is 9 of them. I used a bunch of stat blocks from VGtM for a crew for the pirate. I have 3 swashbucklers each CR 3, an archer with CR 3, a master thief with CR 5, and an enchanter with CR 5. My concern is adding a regular stat block Mind flayed will be too much 

That sounds pretty hardy already.

Now it depends on whether you want/need them to fight it now. You could have the Mindflayer show up and just walk away saying that he trusts he minions to "take care of things." That way the party knows what they have in store for the future.

You could have them save a merchant ship already under attack. That way, the Mindflayer might already be hurt.

_9_ PCs can dish out a ton of damage. On the flip side, the Mind Blast can take out half the party in one shot.

If you wanted to nerf the Mindflayer a bit, make the damage d6s instead of whatever the stats block says.

On second thought, keep it as is. Let him stomp the party (not TPK). Have him float/fly/swim away as the burning ship sinks around them, saying how weak and worthless they are.

Thanks for the feedback! I appreciate it. I’m too used to my party walking over my baddies that I expect to be tough. Maybe this time I can make the party a little afraid 

Have you considered the Adversary illithid lore for this? Maybe you can have the captain work this way. Basically, the host personality overcomes the will of the illithid tadpole and remains themselves, in spirit and mentality anyway. So your captain could have been a pirate before hand, then got captured, infected, and turned Adversary. Just a thought.

If you want to step up the encounter, have the captain be an illithid as you already plan. Have the crew be plain old pirates using the bandit or pirate bosun stat block. No big deal, right? And when a pirate crewman is struck down and killed, on his next turn, his head cracks open and out jumps an intellect devourer. After one or two of these, you party will be EXTREMELY careful about how they deal with the pirates, especially once they figure out there's nothing they can do to stop the intellect devourer from coming out no matter how badly they kill the crewman. Watch them get clever very quickly spending their actions to throw dead crew members overboard or running away from corpses. Or if that seems too strong, make a handful of them intellect devourers, but the party doesn't know which ones are and which ones aren't.

You could give the ship some lair actions. Heck, you could even make the ship controlled by a merrenoloth for particularly weird and spooky effects.

I do like the idea of a psionic pirate captain though.