Vorul-Thal - The Elder Brain
“You did not ‘find’ me. I have been walking through your dreams for months to bring you here.”
Role in Its Society:
Vorul-Thal is the hidden sovereign of a sprawling Underdark region, ruling from a lightless brine pool deep beneath collapsed illithid ruins. To the mind flayers, Vorul-Thal is law, memory, and prophecy made flesh: it allocates victims, assigns experiments, and dictates which surface cities are worth infiltrating or culling.
Beyond the colony, Vorul-Thal’s thoughts seep outward through thralls and stolen minds—duergar overseers, drow priestesses, neogi traders, and even surface nobles bound by psychic contracts. It manipulates trade routes, mine collapses, and border skirmishes to create a controlled ecosystem of fear and scarcity, ensuring a steady flow of intelligent prey.
If Vorul-Thal falls, the entire regional balance shatters. Slave revolts ignite, old grudges between factions flare, and forgotten tunnels become contested frontiers overnight.
Appearance Description:
Vorul-Thal is an enormous brain suspended in a black, oily brine that fills a circular stone basin. Its convoluted folds glisten in hues of sickly mauve and corpse-grey, shot through with faint, pulsing veins of violet light that brighten when it exerts its will.
A forest of thick, rope-like tentacles extends from its underside, drifting slowly through the brine until they dart upward with terrifying speed to grasp anything that comes near the pool’s edge. Around the basin, the stone is fused with chitin and bone—skulls and vertebrae half-melted into the rock, and jagged psionic crystals jutting like teeth.
The air above the pool shimmers faintly, as if seen through heat haze. Anyone stepping too close feels pressure behind their eyes and hears ghost-echoes of whispers, arguments, and screams that never quite resolve into words.
Backstory:
Vorul-Thal began as a node-mind in a far-reaching illithid empire that once spanned multiple Underdark realms. When that empire collapsed under the combined assault of surface armies and rival aberrant powers, most elder brains were destroyed or devoured by their own starving colonies.
Vorul-Thal survived by betraying its kin. It orchestrated a feigned collapse of its own colony, sacrificing thousands of thralls and even many mind flayers to convince its enemies that nothing remained. During the chaos, it siphoned psychic fragments from dying elder brains through long-forgotten psionic conduits, grafting stolen memories and personalities onto itself.
Now, Vorul-Thal remembers cities it never ruled and wars it never fought. It has become obsessed with the idea of a “perfect lattice”—a psychic web spanning multiple planes, connecting every mind like neurons in a single cosmic brain. Its experiments focus on long-distance psionic communication, planar anchors, and breeding thralls capable of surviving both sunlight and the void between worlds.
Rumors among surviving illithids whisper that Vorul-Thal severed its last connection to any higher authority. It no longer serves an empire; it intends to become one.
