The Lore of The Architects of the Awakening (Patreon)

The Architects of the Awakening are a duergar cult who were the villains of my previous campaign. They're also the subject of the next Black Loch map and they have a fairly complex story. My group broke up before I got the chance to tell it all, so I'm going to write it out here in case any of you find them interesting enough to use in your own game.

For a TL;DR, check the end of the last post.

First, we need to talk a bit about duergar history. The duergar were a clan of dwarves who were enslaved by mind flayers for several thousand years.  They eventually rose up against their masters and won their freedom, but their hatred for the illithids never faded.

Some time later, a duergar queen named Duerra launched a war on an illithid city, capturing the residents and performing experiments on them to discover the secrets of their mental powers. She is said to have found the source of their psionic essence and to have infused it into her own people. This tale is more legend than history, but, for the purposes of this story, it is the truth.

It is indisputably true that the duergar possess more of a talent for psionics than most races, but, despite having the psionic essence of the illithids within them, their powers are nowhere near those of their former masters. The question of why this might be is one that the duergar have never really asked. But, about 100 years ago, a priestess named Astali, a follower of Deep Duerra-- the aforementioned queen who later became a goddess-- started asking it. And she was determined to find an answer.

After ten years spent researching the matter and trying to commune with Duerra, Astali found an answer. The psionic essence of the illithids was not, on its own, the force that gave the flayers their power. There was something else in their blood that acted as a catalyst to set it off. The duergar had the fuel, but not the flame to ignite it. Astali believed she could change this.

The means of doing so, however, was an abomination-- both to the duergar race and to Astali herself. The High Lords would kill her for it. She was hesitant, but ultimately decided to go ahead.

More than anything, Astali wished to see the duergar achieve greatness. As it stood, the duergar were the foremost power in the underdark. To empower them with the psionic gifts of the mind flayers would make them the only power in the underdark. Even the surfacers would bow to the grey dwarves. Astali's desire for this future abolished any other concerns she had.

After gathering a group of Duerra's faithful and establishing a base of operations far from her city, Astali began her work. She and her followers began by launching raids on a small illithid settlement, returning with captive flayers and tadpoles.

At this point, I need to pause to briefly explain illithid reproduction, as it plays a key role in the story. Mind flayers are not born as humanoids. Rather, they are small, tadpole-like creatures. These tadpoles are inserted into the ear of a humanoid host, whereupon they consume the brain and transform the body, reshaping them into illithids. While humans, elves and a number of other races can be used as hosts, dwarves cannot.

But, for Astali, awakening the psychic abilities of the duergar would require creating an illithid from a duergar host. Astali, a powerful psionicist, accomplished this using psionic surgery to manipulate the host in several ways, allowing it to better accommodate the illithid tadpole. She made a few other changes as well, preventing the transformation from removing the host's reproductive organs and protecting the host's brain from the tadpole, so that the duergar consciousness would not be replaced by an illithid one. This would be, in essence, a duergar mind with an illithid body.

After losing two followers in her early attempts at this experiment, the third was successful. Half-pleased and half-mortified at what she had created, Astali referred to the creature as a "hybrid" and kept it away from her other followers.

While the creature retained the host's mind and personality and gained the powerful psionic gifts of the mind flayers, it was not the future Astali foresaw for her people. This abomination was merely the first step.

Astali created three more hybrids and had them mate with several of her followers. The hybrids proved able to reproduce with normal duergar and, eventually, bore offspring. These children appeared as normal as any duergar, bearing none of the traits of their hybrid parents, except one: their potent psionic abilities.

This was exactly what Astali had dreamed of: pure, uncorrupted duergar with the innate psionic potency of the illithids. She referred to the children as "the Awakened" and her followers celebrated their achievement. Unfortunately, these celebrations would turn out to be premature.

After creating several dozen Awakened over the next forty years, the first group became old enough to bear and father children. Once they did so, Astali discovered, to her horror, that the children of the Awakened did not inherit the gifts of their parents. This changed everything.

If her plan was to work, the Awakened would have to be able to pass on their power to the next generation. The hybrids could never become a part of duergar society. Even Astali herself would not accept that. She would have to find a way to let the Awakened pass down their gifts.

Here, the story turns from past to present. Astali has spent five years trying to find a way to solve this problem and she believes she has found a way. What she requires now is an aboleth. Aboleths have ancestral memories, passing down all their recollections to their offspring. Astali believes she can find the means by which the aboleths do this and adapt it to the psychic talents of the Awakened, finishing her task once and for all. But aboleths are difficult prey and Astali knows better than to underestimate one. So she and her followers are planning carefully before they make their next move. They have come too far to stumble at the last step.

So, that's the story. If my huge wall of text has caught your interest, I'll talk a bit more about Astali and the Awakened in the DM notes for the map of their headquarters. But, for now, I'd better get back to drawing it.