Todd Kenreck: Mordenkainen's Tome of Foes now has an introductory adventure that gets you familiar with one of the most dangerous conflicts in the D&D multiverse.
Chris Lindsay: It's called Rrakkma, which is spelled R-R-A-K-K-M-A, and that term actually comes from an old D&D reference in the Monster Manual. A Rrakkma is a hunting party of Githzerai that are brought together for the sole purpose of hunting Mind Flayers.
The adventure is there to basically introduce you to some of the elements of Modenkainen's. One of the big elements of the book is these various conflicts, one of which being the conflict between the two different Gith races, the Githzerai and the Githyankis and the Mind Flayers. It's like this little back and forth between these three groups. In order to make it so I could allow both Githyanki and Githzerai in Adventures League Play, I had to go back even to another old bore, which is there is a group called the Sha'sal Khou and the Sha'sal Khou are a renegade basically combined group of Githyanki and Githzerai that are working towards the reunification of the Gith race with the express purpose of wiping out as many Mind Flayerss as they possibly can.
So basically what that means is when you play a Githyanki or a Githzerai in Adventures League Play, you must be a member of the Sha'sal Khou. That isn't a traditional faction like the other factions, like the Harpers or the Zhentarim. It's just basically a part of their backstory that says, "I'm a Githzerai. I get along with Githyankis because that Githyanki and I are part of the same philosophical grouping, essentially, amongst our peoples, and we dig it."
But anyway, so the pre-generated characters that come with the adventure are half Githyanki and half Githzerai. So there's three of each, and you can play this basically as this war band. The Mind Flayers have discovered a really bad artifact that will have a nasty effect on the Gith peoples and you have to track them down out on the outer plains.
The characters are ninth level. Yeah, so it's solid tier two play, which you would expect when you're a group of anything that wants to hunt Mind Flayers. There are things way worse than Mind Flayers in this adventure. Now, I originally wrote this adventure back in third edition as a lark, and it was run as a classic for the Poldark RPG play, but when the books started coming out and I started seeing the stuff and I thought, "You know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna make this real easy on myself." It wasn't actually that easy. And I took the old adventure and I updated it to fifth edition, but what that wound up doing was an entire rewrite because I had to figure out a way to make those two races fit in the campaign. That was challenging.
Are stats for Mind Flares included?
I thought mind flares were a multiple target fire spell with a wisdom save
Is Mind Flares supposed to be Mind Flayers? mind flayer
When will it be available for sale?
Can't wait to see the new Mind Flare monster! :D
I think that 'mind flare' is supposed to be the existing monster Mind Flayer.
As many here have noted y'all need to teach your speech to text program the word "flayer".
Stoked for the adventure!
Yeah - pretty sure it is subtitles taken from the YouTube Video and somewhat hastily re-worked. :P
Did I miss the link?
Also, what do the outer plains look like, I wonder?
Maybe it's a typo?
Anyone else notice that this is a really short article?
It would be really cool if they release an official Mind Flayer player race too in the book.
That's a fascinating idea, but the mind flayers are all psychically linked to each other and the Elder Brain, so there's no way that they would work as part of a party, regardless of alignment. Even if the party was entirely composed of mind flayers, the cooperative dynamic would be all wrong, from a story perspective.
It's true that most mid flayers are connected to the elder brain, but rogue mind flayers are not entirely unheard of. It might be difficult, but I think that a mind flayer race could work.
I was going to pre-order the book with the adventure but I already used the 25% coupon previously, so since they didn't make a NEW COUPON CODE I decided not to do it.
Actually, I did have a mind flayer... It was killed, and then resurrected. When it died, the link to the hive mind was broken. It didn't "relink" after it was resurrected. He was a badass fighter/thief in 2E.
Bran_Lackman,
Rogue mindflayers?! Next, you'll say there are Drow coming to the surface and acting heroically.
Bah!