Varqoor, the Mind Flayer Losing Control - The Problems with Races in D&D with VJ Harris (D&D5e)

How do we solve the problems with race in d&d? What happens when your host body acts up? And what does a mind flayer sound like? Hello friends welcome to characters that stories, a TTRPG podcast about the roads not yet traveled. I'm star. This episode I'm joined by VJ Harris. VJ is a professional TTRPG designer and pro game master. They're most well known for their work with MCDM Productions Arcadia Magazine, and An Elf and an Orc Had a Little Baby they strive to make TTRPG is fun and inclusive. For all those that wish to play and respect others. VJ, I'll give you a chance to plug your projects at the end. But right now, do you want to tell listeners a little bit about yourself?

Yeah, so um, like it was just said, I'm a professional TTRPG designer. I do that and pro gaming full time. When I'm not doing that I'm playing a lot of video games. Current hyper fixation is Minecraft and outer worlds. A loving the kind of sci fi feel of things kind of want to, like, do some more Spelljammer esque stuff because of it. But I don't know why. I've been asked enough times. Okay, what else would you like people to say but stuff that I should just have like a little little spiel written of like, Oh, hey, this is that. I do also spend like, fair chunk of my time playing with my old man have a dog, Nick. But otherwise, pretty much my life is TTRPG design and running it for other people.

Yeah, it sounds like you are you have a lot of projects. So VJ, tell me who are you bringing to the table today?

Yes, of course. So, um, as it was mentioned, I wrote An Elf and an Orc Had a Little Baby, which allows you to mix and match parented traits. So like stuff like oh, you can fly. Or you can breathe underwater with like all of the available 5e races, plus some like traits for monsters. And because of that, I am bringing my lovely spores druid mind flayer Varqoor.

So this character is built for d&d, five E. But you're using the rules from your book, the book that you co wrote, called An Elf and an Orc Had a Little Baby?

Yes.

And, you know, a question came up for me when I was looking at your submission is that mind flayer is not a available race in d&d. And so you're building a character based off of a monstrous race. So a race that is generally considered an antagonist to the Adventures in d&d. How does that work, particularly using your supplement?

Yeah, so the mechanical side of how things work, we took all the 5e races a bunch of actual 5e monsters and stuff and distill them down to okay, what traits do they have, they would like, inherit versus like social things that they would get from an upbringing, split that up, and then allowed you to choose from that, as far as the like, antagonistic part of things goes. That's, that's a that's kind of a core part of the character. Like, not enough people know this, but I am a huge fan of mind flayers. They're literally my favorite monster I have. I have a mind flayer like picture in a frame and storage. I've got like a little mind flayer little like plushy dice bag that holds like 10 dice for when I want to travel with my dice and not the big giant bag. So like, I won't say I'm the like, expert on mind flayers, but I know a lot about them. And there's a lot of like interesting things that you don't inherently learn from any of the like 5e stuff like for example, mind flayers don't actually have to eat the brains of people that are like, currently using them could eat intellect devourers. But if your DM were to homebrew could say oh, you can eat recently dead brains instead of like people that are actually alive or like animal brains but doesn't get as much sustenance but that's like that's more of like a homebrew lorey part than like, actually factually backed up by anything and like, five year previous editions as far as it goes, but back to like the antagonism is on purpose. It's kind of sits in the same place like having a character like that as maybe having a werewolf or a vampire. Like you've been cursed with lycanthropy or vampirism and you're fighting against like these new urges. As you continue your travels with your companions to do whatever deeds you're planning on doing. Just slightly different because when I like to think when you're like when you become aware of your vampire, you're still at your core you there's just something additional there. Whereas Varqoor used to be, I don't even know what like parentage Varqoor used to be maybe a half orc before they were turned into a mind flayer and like that pretty much just completely takes over, save for like, some memories that are left like there's really no consciousness or trace of the person that was before. Again, say for like memories and some personality traits that might bubbled to the surface. So it's just still kind of doing the same thing as vampires and werewolves but with a with a personality that's completely alien to who you would have been before, say for a few bits and pieces.

Can you tell me how An Elf and an Orc Had a Little Baby approaches parentage and upbringing and how that is different from how standard d&d approaches that?

Yeah, so let's take a half orc, for example, right? Current 5e half orc gets relentless endurance, menacing, which allows you to gain proficiency and intimidation skill, you learn language, you get savage attacks, which means when you score critical hit with the melee weapon, you can deal extra damage and extra damage die and darkvision. And that kind of thing, pretty much what An Elf and an Orc does for the official 5e races is take all of these existing traits and sit down and ask, okay, what would you realistically inherit from like your parents, bloodlines? Or your great grandparents or your grandparents that kind of thing? And what is something that you would culturally learn so in the case of the half orc things that would be a parentage thing are darkvision relentless endurance things that would be a upbringing are menacing and savage attacks, and like the languages you use along with any like ability score improvements you get. So really, it just, it still uses the framework of 5e stuff, like there's a couple of occasions where we added an ability to make sure that it was balanced once we split things off from each other. But it's pretty much just taking all of the traits that are there and sitting down and saying, Okay, this goes here, and this goes here. And then after that, it, you're given like 16 or 18 points to like us to buy traits. And you can also get traits that are worth negative points. So like sunlights sensitivity is minus six points. If you take that you get six more points to like play around with that way, it helps balance out a lot of things. So people who are like well, this is gonna be like terrible min maxing which I don't really have a problem with Min maxing I don't think it's that big of a deal in a lot of places, but allows for people to willingly take on detriments, even if they aren't doing it for the additional points were just like, oh, this would be really cool. Oh, I like for example, the like the grung have like something where they have to be in the water every once every like four hours where they start to dry out and potentially die. Like a character could choose to take that on if they wanted an interesting like gameplay sort of thing. But that's pretty much like the gist of how An Elf and an Orc handles race and upbringing while still using the five e official race framework.

Right? So instead of using the word race, in the supplement, you're using the words parentage and upbringing, can you talk a little bit about what those mean?

So the way we treat race in 5e it's supposed to harken back to how we like actually use the word in the real world, in my opinion, you know, different different racial categories of people based on like skin tone and whatnot. And parentage is is the replacement of what race should have been in 5e. Because like, I get where it was going. But as it were race also encompassing things that like, you have to learn culturally, versus just like biological aspect of things, which is how it is often used in the real world. Sansome like other like major issues, so parents is like, okay, look, you were trying to say, Oh, hey, you have these set of attributes that are tied to your biology or whatnot in common. And so parents does what the word race should have done in 5e, if that's what they were going for. And then upbringings handles the part of it where it's like, I'm not going to be born with this stuff. I'm going to have to be a part of XYZ culture, if I'm going to say hey, this is what I learned as I was growing up as a as a kid. Yeah, exactly.

Right? I think that's a really interesting way to do it. Because you have a lot of stories people are often putting You were mentioning a half orc. And when I look is it into their characters that they are what else but they were raised by orcs and what does that mean? You know, because particularly at orcs in d&d, I think there are a lot of that's not the same as being an orc raised by orcs. So I think it improves the basic rules. Also Just divorcing it from the problems there. One of the things that comes up is the way that they talk about the origins of half orc, and how you can't word race, which, obviously that has weird and problematic associations. The way that we use race in real life is very different from the way that they use race in d&d. The word I mean. actually play an orc like it's actually not a playable race. There has to be something mixed within it, in order for it to become playable, which I think is kind of messed up.

Yeah. I'm sorry, I could go on. Or like I love orcs. Like if mind flayers are my favorite monster orcs, half orcs are my favorite five E race as it were. And I like I routinely play some type of an orc and a lot of the games that I plan so much, and always typically code them as black because I'm like, I'm claiming orcs for black people. They're ours, which I mean, obviously other people of color. If you're like, Hey, I'm also claiming them like no big deal. It's just how I like to interpret orcs for a variety of reasons. But yeah, there's a lot of language that harkens back to the ways in which black and indigenous people are spoken about in the real world as far as like, civilizing us through taking us away from our culture and planting us into white culture. Or like just having this like fiery rage in our blood, we're always going to be savages kind of situation or like big brutes and whatnot. So yeah, there's a lot of uncomfortable white supremacy s language used on the half works, which is also part of the reason why An Elf and an Orc Had a Little Baby was made to like, address bioessentialism. And to like, give alternatives like, Hey, you don't have to do racist things with with the orcs.

Yeah, it's definitely a problem. And it's kind of just baked in from the origins, you know, coming from Tolkien and some fantasy works that had really bad ideas to start with. Obviously, Tolkien's orcs are coded racially and then also depicted as monolithically evil. And that was brought into d&d. And I think the idea of any race, being associated with evil in that way is a terrible idea. And it in the case of races that are racially coded, it's also racist.

Exactly.

The other thing that I think of when I think of things like half orcs and half elves, and that is that they're an assumed mix with humans, that we don't say, half human, even though that is also true. And so I think the nice thing about the supplement is that it gives you the ability to be half orc, half elf, for example. And that that's not an assumed human mix.

Yeah, exactly. Like, I am not going to talk a lot about like, the mixed nature of things. Because I'm a mono racial black guy. It's not my experience to speak to, but I can just say, there's a lot of assumptions about like, who was mixed with what, and like how that mixed-ness is titled, like, it's all like you said, like, half work half elf. Again, you never see half human like, it's like, they're assumed to be the default, which is wild in a fantasy setting that has that like wild in a fantasy setting in general, but also wild for a player's handbook that had a bunch of the official kind of default, races for the game be not humans. But yeah, I just have previously had questions like, Why does it always feel like if I say, I'm a half orc, people are gonna assume I'm part of this. And I really wanted people to feel well, me and Adam, didn't just work on this for myself. I ever want anybody to like, be like, Oh, it's just me. It's like, no, no, it's me and Adams love child.

What's Adams full name? Let's give Adam some credit.

Adam Hancock, amazing d&d creator brought me on to the project actually asked me if I wanted to work on it, because it started off as it's like, oh, I want to do this and then brought me on and ever since it's been like, our thing that we periodically go back to like, we had Volume One, we had blamed two, we're working on volume three, and always have each other's backs as far as credit goes, when it comes to like, who did what? Like if you were like, Oh, it's just been it's become like, Yeah, but don't forget Adam. And then Adam does the same thing for me. But yeah, at least for me, I always had when I played half orcs I always had a feeling of like, everybody assuming that I was part human. And there's just like, I mean, yeah, sure. I'll default to that. It's not like it means anything. mechanically. So then when we did An Elf and an Orc Had a Little Baby I was like, Ah, okay, obviously, I could have been saying no, no, I'm part like drow or something and saying, Yeah, I just have some kind of like, you know, you can see like the Elven features, along with my like orcas features, but just being able to like, break it down and be like, yeah, no, actually, I'm a half. I'm half orc half Drow elf. And yeah, I actually was like, raised by my drow side of the family. So you know, I learned a bunch of stuff, that kind of thing.

So going into Varqoor and I think it's interesting. You mentioned taking the monstrous and bringing that into something that's playable. One of the things that I thought of when you're talking about werewolves and vampires, is that monsters, they often start from something human. You know, a vampire starts as a human, a werewolf starts as a human and then they gain these monstrous abilities and monstrous characteristics. Is that something that attracted you to inhabiting a monster?

Yeah, I think so. I definitely think that is the case. Sometimes I have a hard time explaining why I have such a soft spot for legitimate monstrous races, like I know, they'll call like bugbears and Orcs and stuff, monstrous races. I'm just like, those are just different like humanoids. They're not really monstrous, only monstrous because of you know, lore connotations versus like vampires, werewolves, mind flayers, like those are actual monstrous, they are monsters. And I can't put a finger on why I have such kinship towards monstrous things. But what you were saying like, yeah, that's definitely a part of it.

Do you have a better understanding maybe of why you're so attracted to mind flayers in particular?

Okay, one, I get to make cool noises when I play them. Like if I play them, and when I'm in person with somebody and I play them, I do like little. And like my, I put like my hand up to my mouth and wiggle my fingers around, like I have tentacles. So there's a little bit of that, right. But then there's also like, I mean, one of the things I really love about mind flayers is their ability to change other entities into something else. Like, in my opinion, mind flayers are the genesis of like, d&d monsters, like there are other monsters that transform people, like whatever transforms people into deep spawn, or how the aboleth can turn people into can aboleth spawn or whatever, or whatever it's called. But mind flayers are the ones that take their tadpoles and stick them into other creatures to see oh, what is this going to do? Can it be something that I can use for help? And I'm just like, I feel like from a like storytelling and design perspective, there's so much that can be done with that. Like, there are a lot of official like 5e things that have already been turned into mind flayers like beholders, dragons, I think they're a couple of other things that like canonically Oh, I think you can turn a purple worm into a mind flayer like creature, there's like the Neolithid, which turns into one if a brine pool gets abandoned for one reason or another and all of them eat each other into there's only one left. Like there's a lot of things that that are official 5e stuff that are created from mindflayers or tadpoles. And I'm just like the experimentation that mind flayers like to do on a mechanical sense means that there are a lot of things that I get to experiment with. And it's like yeah, chalk it up to the mind flayers kind of thing I don't even have to have a super in depth detailed lore explanation for how this evolved or magically transformed and that's just like, oh, yeah, I was probably a mind flayer allows me to do completely wild things. And then from a storytelling aspect of it all so like officially mind flayers typically only put their xeromorphosis into humans, elves and Orcs, I believe, because any other parentage, and you get like kind of weird things happening. Like for example, it's either the gnome or the halfling with like little squidling and I one, I liked the chance to explore what that looks like if you infect any of the like by the official parents does with a mind flayer tadpole to see what you get into. There's this thing that I like to do in my settings, which I haven't done to a player yet I have done to a NPC. The process of xeromorphosis to get a little larva they put it in the eye and it goes into your brain and begins to turn you into a mind flayer there's like a small percentage chance that it doesn't actually take effect but that it also doesn't kill you or kill the like little tadpole. So at that point, you've got this like tadpole entity living inside of your head while you're still like also you and it opens up a lot of like, interesting roleplay too, to be able to say, oh, yeah, I've got this like Alien foreign thing in my head that kind of has some knowledge to it, because I like to think that like, mind players are a telepathic and cyanic culture I like to think that these xeromorphs, the little larva that like hanging out on in the brine pool underneath the elder brain or like telepathically, given all of the information that, you know, a newborn mind flayer would need to know about, like, the history and that kind of thing. And so I like to think of it as like, oh, maybe you have like a supercomputer of knowledge in your head that maybe you can access to your detriment. Like, if you want to try and say, I'm going to think really hard and try to get these memories out of here. It could have dangerous effects, but also allow you to potentially answer a question you probably wouldn't have been able to answer otherwise, or without like, something like a really high powered legend, lore or something.

Yeah, that's really interesting. I think, as a player, I also really appreciate having something within a character that is hidden to the character. And that gets a chance to come out in unexpected ways. I think that's always really fun.

Exactly

I wonder how important it is to you what the lore of the parentage is, you know, for example, dwarves are hardy, and they work with stone and all of that information, how important that is to you when you're deciding on a character.

Pretty much in every instance, I'm going to say don't let the lore of a race or something stop you from playing out an interesting like concept that you want to play. And I say that as a player and as DM astral elves, for example, let's say that I was just like, oh, yeah, astral elf don't exist in the prime material plane at this point. I don't know if it's canon, but like the part of it that's can into like my homebrew world is that obviously there is like other planets in the system that the material plane planet exist on. But a bunch of them are like sci fi tech kind of thing in the material plane isn't it seems like fantasy magic era. And that's why there's a lot of high level restriction between the planets of the material plane and the rest of the solar system. Because it's like, well, this part of the universe or whatever is used to dealing with science tech, that's gonna introduce more magic than might be their completely throw off how things work up people's nations, etc, etc. And the magic part, which is, you know, has some techno arcane stuff because you know, you have artificers and stuff is not at that point where they're particularly equipped to deal with the more science tech of things. And so there's people like, Hey, you can't traffic in this, you can't do this, like keeping things separate for the most part. And but like, let's, let's say that I said, there were no actual elves in the fantasy world part of this universe, and they're all out in space, and that none of the players are from space. If somebody was really like, I really want to play like a fish out of water, kind of astral elf. That's like down in the material plane, I'd be like, All right, okay, so here's your options, you could have been stuck in cryo stasis or something like your pod crash landed me in here for, I don't know, that was near or something asleep, and then you woke up. And now you're part of this, I think lore plays important roles. For players for DMS. I think as long as you're not going to buck wild with it, I think lore's best use is to inspire players to do something that's wildly out of the box. So like I said, my afterlife where you'd like to crash landed in a spaceship and you've been in stasis for XYZ amount of years, your body is reactivating, you've forgotten your other abilities, that kind of thing. lore is important for a couple of reasons. But I don't think it should ever hinder. Players are building a character unless like you've gone into it saying, hey, and the other players agree to it. This is the exact type of game I'm running. So there are no humans. They are all gone because of some natural disaster. And you are all playing what d&d refers to as monstrous races, and you're going to uncover while the humans are gone. Like that is a very clear, specific campaign thing that's happening there. Where and if everybody agrees to it, you shouldn't try and be like, well, I want to be the one human like, not in that situation. Outside of like very specific campaign details and ideas that you should you know, check in and make sure your players want to do it in the first place. I don't think lore should be something that restricts the character creation idea.

Yeah, I think that's where An Elf and an Orc does something really right and that you get to keep the lore but you divorce the lore from your character's alignment, for example, which is is weird to me in the first place that alignment and race are linked, but also you can go against the established lore for your particular character.

Exactly, exactly.

You talked about being drawn to your ability to roleplay a mind flayer and I love I love your example of the voice and the and the hand motions on all of that. At what was the inspiration behind Varqoor in particular,

I was gonna say I rarely get to play, which is not actually, I can be a player every every Saturday. But I'm currently playing like a half orc, half tiefling character. So I'm starting a new game today, like an hour or so after, after we get off this call. And so it's, it's less than I never get to play and more that I have never gotten an opportunity to be in a game where somebody will let me play a mind flayer. So I had never sat down. I thought about full mind flayers and mixed mind flayers, because in most of my settings, I'm like, Hey, listen, I know that mind flayers primarily reproduce the xeromorphosis, but like, what did they also could have kids? You know, what if they figured out how to do that, like, if a mind flayer got out of the from under the control of an elder brain, the influence as it were, and went off, topside fell in love with I don't know, a dwarf didn't want to and didn't have the ability to like, put them through the mind flaying. Let's just have some kids. So like, there are mixed mind flayers running about as well, you know. And so I've always thought about, like, what that lore looks like, in means in my setting, but it's like, I haven't sat down and been like, Okay, if somebody gave me the chance, who would I play? How would I play it? Why would I play them. And that, like, I didn't have any, like, super concrete influences. But that's why Varqoor came to be the like, I want to play this one day. And I don't think I get to use An Elf and an Orc Had a Little Baby, as much as I would like to like I for my pro games I offer as an option for people to build their characters out. You know, and people do take me up on that, oftentimes, because you know, it's a good system lets you do a lot of different things with it. And it's fun to see how people use it. But I'm like, I think I'm gonna start building out player characters with my system some more, it's fun, and it could fine tune something fun, like, oh, this doesn't make sense. We need to fix that.

Would you say that when you're building a character is your approach kind of like, I would really like to try this particular parentage. Or I would really like to try this class, for example, what kind of is the first thing that you do when you're building a character?

Previously, before An Elf and an Orc Had a Little Baby, it was definitely picked my class. First, I have a list of all the classes that I haven't played coupled with the subclasses. I want to play with them. And so previously, it's like, okay, I haven't played this and I want to play this. And then I go back and be like, Okay, what am I feeling? Like? It would be part way what are good mechanics for this class? But also, what am I feeling? Even? Let's say it was a spore druid? Even if I was like, oh, a hill dwarf is the perfect synergy for like, the class and the abilities to Hill dwarf God, if I was like, Yeah, I'm not feeling a hill dwarf for this character, though. I wouldn't do it. There was rare occasions where I would pick something that just didn't synergize like gave me an intelligence boost versus the wisdom that I needed. But mostly, I tried to find something like gave me the boost that I wanted. But I still felt like yeah, this is where this goes. Now that I have An Elf and an Orc Had a Little Baby. And a lot of the times I'm allowed to use it when I'm building things like I check in with the DMs like, Hey, I made this here's how this works. Is it okay, if I do this? Like that's what happened with the Saturday game that I play in on total party kisses Twitch stream called strange hunger? It's a sci fi horror game. I like asked my team Alex, Hey, can I use An Elf and an Orc Had a Little Baby? Here are the options for the orc and tiefling parents it is and all Alex said was, hey, can you not pick the wing version of the tiefling parent? I was like, Yeah, sure. And then went on to build whatever the hell I wanted to build from that. But before it was kind of like, what kind of story do I want to tell? Which is still a part of it? But now it's like, okay, what kind of traits do I want to grab that will shape what kind of story I can tell, right? So because we have a point systems and you can take traits from different parents just as long as you have points, you could technically like in the first book, The way we describe, it's like, Hey, if you want to do a family tree, to explain why you're able to gain access to this, you can so we had a whole thing where like, there was one family that was half lean into the line person, half tiefling, I think, and then that kid, married to another family that I think was like, half dwarf, half total. And then those two had kids. And then that kid got to choose traits from like, both parents, and then both sets of grandparents because it's down that line, and the upbringings also have a point system to it. So like we have suggestions like hey, here's militaristic upbringing, that kind of thing. But they also have points. So if you're like, oh, actually, my grandparents have these backgrounds, and my parents have this. So I'm actually going to take things from that with the number of points I had. So am I telling a story where there are multiple traits coming in, in combination to this one kid, multiple traits and upbringings? Or is it just like my straight mind flayer which is you know what I did for Varqoor, and once that's been answered, and I've like, picked my upbringing, it's like, okay, so I know who I'm playing. If multiple traits are playing a part of it, I already have some kind of idea of how that's going to work. And if it's not, it's like, okay, I know who I'm playing. Now, who is this character? Who are you what class and subclass is going to really tell the story that I want to tell about you?

Who is Varqoor? You mentioned that they are a spore druid. But if you could tell me, you know, kind of their age, their gender, you know, if you've thought of their sexuality, kind of the basics,

Since I've mentioned, like Varqoor was created from xeromorphosis on another individual, probably half orc. Varqoor is about 23-24. A youngun. I can't believe I'm calling 23 a youngun.

It's a youngun to me, honestly,

A young 20. Varqoor is a young 20 I went with spore droid because like there's a lot of like fungus and whatnot down in the Underdark. And I like the idea that the person that Varqoor was which I have no idea what their name is, was a druid and was probably like, captured on a raid like a druid circle or something and brought back to be turned wasn't through maybe a low level through it that was taken and was trying to like protect their home. And then Varqoor stayed in the mind flayer colony for a while around all of like the natural underdark planted and whatnot, the fungus and stuff and then was sent off somewhere else and heard the other person like in their head and was like, I don't know what to do about this and was far enough from the elder brain to like, break free of that influence and like run off to try and figure out what was going on. And then while off in nature, like realize they had an affinity for said nature, but it was expressing itself in like more fungal matter than like your standard flora. And so realize that connection to nature, which I also think the other person will say that works name of Thranz, I think Thranz was just like, yeah, you feel that that's the love that I had for nature. And then that's when Varqoor is like, Okay, I am a second level druid spore druid because of like how long I spent in the Underdark and having an affinity for the fungus and whatnot, and is just kind of out and about in the world for a long time trying to figure out who they are. And I think, I don't know if my players really have like a concept of gender the way that other humanoids might or that even we do, but like, if I was going to give Varqoor pronouns, it'd be they them. I think the like, non binary aspect of gender would suit a lot of mind flayers, well, if they even cared about the concept, because like, yeah, like for mind flayers that are under the influence of a elder brain, they have access to, you know, the ceremony, so they don't have to actually go out and have like, you know, sexual relations with other parents or just to have kids and probably don't feel the need to since if they eat a brain, they get a lot of the memories and like rushes of emotion and stuff. So they really could just be like, out here eating people to experience like sexual gratification and orgasms and all that other stuff. So like, I don't think mind flayers really, in general in their like, elder brain societies think about gender, if like somebody asked me like, like, they know what the concept is, because they've eaten people, they've read people's minds and be like, Hmm, that's not really something that we we do just just here's my name, assuming they were like interacting with you on a professional level and not about the issue. But yeah, Varqoor would just definitely be. Yeah, I've heard about this particular one, we'll go with this for now. And unless that changes, or something else makes sense. But yeah, that's my kid.

I think it's interesting, you know, that you're going with spore druid because when I think of fungus, I think of they kind of have this infiltration ability, like you're often symbiotic with plants or with animals, you know, we have so much fungus living within us. And there's this this similar kind of thing with mind flayers is that there's, in your case, a synergy happening between the mind flayer and the original host, but also just the, you know, infiltrating other bodies and becoming part of another organism. Was that part of your idea?

Yeah, I wish I could say yes. That's actually a really good, I got I gotta make a note of that. If I ever get to play Varqoor in like a longer term campaign and be like, hey, this was mentioned to me at one point. Um, but no, it was really just the I know, I want to play through it. And it was really like, I want to play through it. I want to play the subclass. How does it make sense for the character? How do I connect it back to it because I want to play Varqoor. That is the main person that I want to play. Okay, I also want to play a spore druid. But how does that work with this character, and if I couldn't make it work, I would go down to another class and subclass to see if this works better with that, but because they're in the Underdark and there's a lot of fungus Not to mention, like actual fungus people, you know, the myconid a lot of things just kind of floating down there. I was like, Okay, this makes sense about why they would have an affinity to spores when the hosts when Thranz didn't have a druid circle at this point when they returned into Varqoor. So it was more like, how does this work? Where they are and with the information that I have already?

I know what mind flayers look like in general, but can you tell me about Varqoor's particular appearance?

Yeah, so I think I kind of liked the idea that mind flayers typically, you know, share pretty much identical appearances, say for occasional, like, something's from the host body translate over. So maybe like, Varqoor might have some little tusks. Somewhere underneath is like tentacle mouth or, but actually, what I what I actually think it is, is that Thranz had like a long cut along his left eye when he was out and about in nature once when he was when he was younger, and injured himself. And sure Druids can heal but I also kind of imagined that this would be like, hey, yeah, we can use magic to heal a lot of things. But like, it's also okay for our bodies to do its natural course and heal for us. And so that's why like, still has this long scar. And it's also Varqoor has it too, it's the long scar down is right? I still see out of it. Like it didn't Thranz wasn't blinded from it. But otherwise, I think at the start of this adventure, Varqoor besides that scar, it looks like pretty much every other mind flayer, I think something that wouldn't be fun and interesting to figure out like even though Varqoor is a spore druid could still wild shape into a variety of things. What if any, like injury that they get in their wild shape form, they have the scars on their bodies as if they'd been cut unless somebody heals it. So the whole damage doesn't carry over still works. It's not like if I take 10 points of damage on like my bare form, that I'm also getting 10 points of damage on like my mind flayer for him, but it is still affecting me and causing me to, you know, have a number of different scarring on there. And part of me is like, maybe it has something to do with the fact that Varqoor is in control. Like there. I don't think there's any point in the story where thrones like takes over control. But Thranz is they're talking. There's a split in the headspace and like I want to be clear, I'm not if I play this, it'd be very careful not to play into weird like schizophrenic tropes or anything. And like, I'm not trying to say that Varqoor is schizophrenic like Thranz does exist Thranz, like the host body's conscious is there in some way. And so maybe because there's not really synergy between the two, like, here's Thranz who's you stole my life and my body say, That's my scars. That's my scars, my scars on your face when it was on my face. And there's not like a lot of synergy or a lot of companionship or camaraderie between the two at the start of the adventure, and maybe there never is. And so that is fucking with the druidic magic that in like a regular case, wouldn't be carrying over scars on to do with body when they're in animal form. I don't know how exactly that would work for an explanation. Like it would need something deeper. But like that's kind of what I what I imagined. And then that allows for like, more and more Varqoor to stop looking like your standard mind flayers.

Is Varqoor adventuring, so they can kind of figure out what's going on with this other person inside them, or is there another reason why they kind of set out to begin with?

I think what's happening with Thranz is such a rare occurrence that wild mind flayers know it can happen because xeromorphosis, like I said, I think that the elder brain downloads all this information into the larva, they get put into people, but this might be the first time it's ever happened in this in this mind flayer hive. When it happens to Varqoor with Thranz out and about on a raid, spooks them in a way that they never felt that emotion before. I think the fight or flight response, humanoids have kicks in I don't know if my player thought that or not, and just runs off at that point has run off off in the middle of nowhere can't contact the other mind flayers that they were with and is just kind of stuck out there on their own, maybe to a point where they're kind of starving because they have to my players have to eat like I think I need a brain like maybe once a day at least and like if you go X amount of days, that becomes a problem and are just like completely disconnected from everything that has to do with being a mind flayer at that point. And like do you stumble across like I don't know somebody that was recently mauled by a bear is like clearly going to die. But it's still like technically alive, barely bleeding out and just like eat the brain. They eat the brain instead, we're throwing this like, fix, fix, fix, fix him like Thranz. Like you can do this like just literally reach out and instead of like, just eat them. And of course Thranz is absolutely disgusted. Look at this. And that just it Thranz this anger and whatnot just pushes Varqoor more away from the whole mind flayer thing and then has some time to be like, Oh, okay, this is different, like their mind isn't influenced by anything. The influence of the brain might actually be why Thranz couldn't break through, initially, but further away throngs in their head yelling at them on and off, what what are you doing bubble, blah, recounting flashes of Thranz's memories wanting to understand what emotions they're feeling and seeing for they head off and like, I don't have to be the way that I was before.

If you were to get the chance to play Varqoor, do you think that in the roleplay, you would actually roleplay Thranz at the table. And if you were to do that, would you use a different voice for them?

Oh, definitely. I kind of imagined Thranz is like, kind of something deeper like Varqoor. Listen to me. Just reach your hand out, and just feel the emotion just just feel what I'm feeling. Touch them and fix them. I think Varqoor communicates almost solely telepathically. I think that the way that because of the like tentacles and like the weird shaped throat and mouth, the way that mind flayers speak might be like nails against a chalkboard for other races. And so did that once had somebody's ears bleed because of it and now just speaks telepathically? I do different voices. I'm actually not sure what Varqoor would sound like telepathically because it's definitely different than whatever they'd sound like if they were speaking. But yeah, definitely low register for Thranz and then something for Varqoor.

Varqoor, what's something you're naturally good at?

Well, before all this nonsense with Thranz started, I was pretty good at capturing other creatures for experimentations. I really get to tracking them down, studying them for what the larva would do with me, injected them with it. I have actually been able to witness a Beholder be turned into a mind witness, which is an interesting process. And actually before I before I left, you actually gotten a hold of a dragoloth, a fiend mixed with the drow that we were going to see what would happen if the xeromorphosis took hold. But I left before any of that can happen.

VJ, thank you so much for sharing your character and coming on the podcast. How can people find you? What kind of projects do you want to share?

Well first and foremost since you mentioned I am a podcaster. You can find me on VJ talks on Spotify, Amazon Music pod bean, my website VJs creations.com. Yeah, those are the four places for the time being branching out to other places. As soon as I figured out how to get them there. I actually have an episode about mixed race identity. In d&d, I did a roundtable with a bunch of people. I am also a professional freelance TTRPG designer, um, you can go to my website to the Projects page of vjhcreations.com/products. To find all the stuff that I've been a part of and where you can buy it if it's available for purchase at this point. And then finally, I am also a pro gm over on start playing.games where I strive to make a fun inclusive game for everybody that's there to respect each other. But especially minorities, because I know it can be a hard time finding a group that not only do you gel with but are also going to treat you with the respect humanity and dignity that you deserve. So yeah, and if you're looking for that, it's start playing.games.

Yeah, I'll put links to all of this in the episode description so it'll be easy for people to find this.

Thanks for having me. This is this is a lot of fun. Yeah, I

Yeah I really enjoyed talking about Varqoor and talking about An Elf and an Orc Had a Little Baby. I think it's a great approach and kind of solves a lot of problems that d&d has and I am excited to try it out in a future game.

I'd love to hear what you think.

You can find me on TikTok at Starmamac. You can also listen on YouTube just search for characters without stories. Please Like Subscribe rate review, share with your friends, share with people who aren't even your friends share with everyone. Every little bit helps. I'm currently accepting submissions, particularly for non d&d characters. So if you'd like to share your character you can go to the submission form at characters without stories dot thanks for listening and may all of your characters find their stories. You may have noticed my new music. I want to give a special shout out to Ryan from Eyes on the Moon Studios, check out his links in the episode Description.