Metabiotic Outerfolk

Metabiotic outer folk are intelligent, individually powerful and, whether from loyalty to the Colossi, or for their own reasons, work to aid the overthrow of reality. They act as captains and strategists, champions and technical specialists, leading or organising or empowering the lesser forces of the Outerfolk.  

Mind Flayers

Perhaps the best known of these outerfolk are the mind flayers. These ruthless, implacable psychic predators have no physical form, and can not act without seizing control of a corporeal body from another being, one native to the World they are attacking. They arrived on Aiaos in terrible, living battleships, with coiled-shell hulls which gave them the name 'nautiloid'. Each nautiloid contained a brine pool, a bath of Void-tainted fluid in which the consciousnesses of mind flayers roil, gathering a horrid, leech-like proto-form around their psychic presence, which they can use as a bridge to transform a living being into a host.   A mind flayer 'tadpole' enters the mind of a potential host and warps its psychic landscape. This process of psychomorphosis allows a mature illithid consciousness to enter the host, eradicating all but fragments of its original psyche and distorting their body to better fit the new controlling will. The transformed mind flayer is sheathed in a rubbery, protective skin. Its head is bulbous and often crested, and a mass of psychic tentacles depend from its face, writhing in and out of reality.  

Slaadi

In a similar fashion to illithid psychomorphosis, the slaadi use infection to transform a mortal into a host. Born from a great crystal vessel in the Far Astra, a new Slaad consciousness must incarnate in order to develop.   An adult slaad can deposit an egg in a living being. The egg grows into a larval form, colloquially called a 'slaadpole', which then consumes vast quantities of flesh - beginning with the remains of the host - to power its metamorphosis into a hulking, blue-skinned 'adolescent' form. It later sheds much of its bulk to become an adult red slaad.   Red slaadi further evolve by cultivating arcane power, and after undergoing a third metamorphosis enter the green phase. Green slaadi are tactical leaders, and may metamorphose into the grey form - strategists and leaders - before finally becoming eligible to assume one of the thirteen leadership positions on the Council of Deaths.   If slain, a slaad's essence returns to the Astra. A developed slaad cannot, and would not wish to, go through the larval stage again. Instead, the blue form's claws transmit a disease which transforms its victims directly into hosts for the higher forms.   Since the sealing of Aiaos, the ability of the slaadi to act on the surface are limited. While adapted to spread their numbers rapidly, their initial foothold requires them to get flippers on the ground and make subtle inroads to infect an area. Since those initial flippers usually belong to blue slaadi projected into the world as 'slaadpoles', and blue slaadi are not subtle, their incursions tend to be brief and bloody rather than effective and lasting.   Scholars of the outerfolk are divided on whether the slaadi resemble very large Smoothfolk because their first hosts on Ainos were smoothfolk, or if it is pure coincidence.  

Beholder

That the mind flayers and the slaadi require host bodies is a source of scorn from the Beholders. Creatures of vast mental power, beholders warp the world around them in such a way as to force reality to accept their psychic form as a physical entity. They dwell in regions of distorted time and space, where distance and direction are uncertain references. The forms they adopt are crude, roughly spherical and bustling with eye-stalks, all capable of projecting lethal blasts of energy or reality-warping effects. Unlike mind flayers and slaadi, beholders have little internal organisation, each acting as a lone agent in control of a multitude of domestic outerfolk and mortal cultists. Their forces sometimes include smaller, weaker versions of themselves, born from their dreams.  

Spawn Seers

Finally, the seers are believed to be powerful survivors of doomed worlds who chose to follow the Colossi instead of perishing with their people. They lead cohorts of weaker Void spawn to manifest wherever there is a chance to do so.   With the aid of foolish mortal sects, the seers and their ilk are drawn by summoning rites and manifest from a powerful node of elemental energy, shaping them to one of four forms: star spawn are born from air, core spawn from stone, deep spawn from water, and flame spawn from fire.   Unlike the lesser spawn, which are largely mindless and driven by a purpose coded into their manifestation, seers retain much of their original self, but swollen and corrupted with the power of the Void. Their motives are as varied as they are, but all are united in a single principle: that their survival was more important than the survival of their world or any other.