Maanzecorian

Maanzecorian (meaning "creed leader" or "creed liaison" in Undercommon), was an entity that embodied the mind flayer concept of complete comprehension of knowledge. The illithid god of secret knowledge was one of the first casualties in Tenebrous's search for his wand.

"Dead, god is dead! The secrets are lost. It has slain our great Maanzecorian…"

- Dleniacorus, former proxy of Maanzecorian.

Description
Maanzecorian appeared as a illithid with purple-green skin and yellowed tusks on the sides of his tentacles.

Personality
Like his superior Ilsensine, the vain Philosoflayer believed the illithids to be the natural rulers of all planes and worlds and born dominators of all other races, those lesser breeds fit only to be their food and slaves. However, the sagacious deity also considered that there were valuable things to be learned from other minds before consumption, the act of devouring brains a delight made all the sweeter if looked forward to and indulged in later on.

The mind flayer god of secrets was a veritable treasure trove of lore and knowledge, some of it of multiversal importance and other pieces seemingly innocuous bits of trivia and personal information.

Powers
Maanzecorian's avatar had a vast array of magic at their disposal. It could cast domination, hypnotism, hypnotic pattern, rainbow pattern, and power word stun three times per day. Once per day he could create a disjuncton, screen, or call down a weird on a nearby group of creatures.

Possessions
A silver crown levitated above Maanzecorian's head with a gem of brightness embedded inside, though the light had no ill effects on illithids.

Realm
Maanzecorian's realm was on the second layer of Gehenna, the violent and inhospitable mount of Chamada. The conceited god's palace was known as Rictus, a lavish abode furnished with jet, jade, ivory, marble, and various types of skins, and which also housed a great library of arcane works.

He also had a base for his spies and proxies near the Caverns of Thought in the Outlands known as the Rotting Oracle. The structure was half-sunk in an oily mire, and housed the end of a one-way portal from Gehenna between two of its pillars.

Activities
On rare occasions, due to the small size of his clergy, Maanzecorian would attend the conclaves of his priests as an avatar to converse, meditate, and share knowledge, preferring to do the lattermost activity directly rather than with omens. If a situation seemed highly favorable, it was possible he would even appear to negotiate conflicts between mind flayers and other races.

Relationships
Though always deferential to Ilsensine, the Great Brain was also Maanzecorian's rival, hence the Rotting Oracle to spy upon it, and he didn't always share all he knew with his superior. Aside from her, his only ally was the drow goddess of vengeance Kiaransalee.

Maanzecorian had many divine enemies, including most of the Dark Seldarine, the gods of the duergar, Shevarash, Dugmaren Brightmantle, and Callarduran Smoothhands.

Worshipers
Illithid religion was different in many ways from most faiths in that it lacked the mystical element. As a race able to naturally plane shift, the Outer Planes were not considered to be a mythic realm, and nor was it envisioned an afterlife since illithids didn't believe they had god-governed souls. So long as their own brains were returned to the elder brain, as they incorrectly believed, an illithid would live on as part of the collective, joining mind and spirit with those before them. Though the illithid gods had a lack of petitioners from their patron race because of this, only worshipers were needed for gods to sustain themselves, but even the description of worshiper could be considered a stretch.

The illithids followed their deities not because of any promise of life after death, but because they truly believed such entities were worthy of being worshiped, holding ideals, beliefs, and goals they shared. The illithid deities were unconventionally venerated, as manifestations of ideal mental states (both philosophical and psionic) that mind flayers revered. Sometimes illithids meditated on these concepts while performing physical movements to help them achieve the right state of mind, which was often mistaken for worship. However, while the mind flayers acknowledged the existence of divine beings, might have envied the knowledge of their gods, and sometimes even supplicated and entreated outer-planar entities for favors, their innate, overwhelming egotism prevented them from truly "worshiping" them.

As an abstract, Maanzecorian was considered narrower in scope than Ilsensine, who embodied psionic union with the self and the realm of universal knowledge. Maanzecorian represented the ideal of total understanding, a state in which one's thoughts, experiences, and innate talents were all simultaneously brought to the forefront rather than conceptualized one at a time as needed. Mind flayers that emulated Maanzecorian had long been fascinated by the perfect memories of the aboleths, who possessed a racial memory that passed from one generation to the next and could always be flawlessly remembered, leading to frequent conflict between the two races.

Clergy
Maanzecorian's priesthood was concerned with pursuing and exploiting knowledge (such as that gained from exploring new territory), and negotiating with other races, always to be done from a position of strength and with an element of condescension. His following was not only small, but also select, the veneration of Maanzecorian never having been able to reach Ilsensine's level of influence, although the clergy was kept small partially because Maanzecorian didn't want to give off the impression that he was trying to usurp Ilsensine's primacy.

Even so, illithids that once revered him were dismayed to wake one sleep-period to find they could no longer channel divine spells, and their prayers went unanswered even in the forms of signs. Divination into his realm eventually made clear a single, inescapable conclusion: Maanzecorian had been slain. In Oryndoll, the Cult of the Philosoflayer was a minor faction of the Venerator Creed before Maanzecorian's death, since which the Elder Conclave had begun a vast effort to reobtain his knowledge before it was lost to Gehenna or some avaricious entity elsewhere. They once had a small house of worship called the Cenotaph of Maanzecorian.

History
Given that the illithids themselves were mysteries of the cosmos, it was practically impossible to discern the origin of Ilsensine or Maanzecorian.

Sometime in the mid‒14 century DR, Maanzecorian was believed to have been killed by Tenebrous, a shadowy manifestation of Orcus, after his defeat at the hands of Kiaransalee. Upon discovering that Maanzecorian, being a deity of secrets, knew information that could lead to the location of the Wand of Orcus, Tenebrous ripped that knowledge from Maanzecorian's mind before uttering the Last Word, destroying the deity's essence. His realm of Rictus boiled away along with him, and whatever remained had been crumbling to pieces without its deity.

The death of god had many repercussions, and as a god of knowledge, information literally comprised much of his spirit. Wisps of his very essence scattered from Maanzecorian's dying body, bathing the surrounding area in eons of collected secrets. Random bits of knowledge would come into the minds nearby uninvited, similar to one of the disorienting psychic storms of the Astral Plane. Though a few of his proxies, namely mind flayers known as Dleniacorus and Hananolith, managed to escape, their ties to him were too strong and they soon died in unimaginably horrific agony.

Rumors and Legends
With Maanzecorian's death, Ilsensine became the undisputed supreme god of the mind flayers. However, even when annihilated by the power of the Last Word, it was possible that Maanzecorian wasn't truly dead. A minor remnant of the Philsoflayer resided on the far flung world of Penumbra, a massive ring that was to the sun in its center what a plate was to a pea, and the former capital (not homeworld) of the illithid empire.

On the ring long abandoned by the mind flayers themselves, residing in one of his temples not entered in ages, was a pale reflection of Maanzecorian's power, barely capable of forming a shadow of an avatar. This was the last trace of Maanzecorian's being in the multiverse, at least for some time. Mind flayer colonies still adhered to Maanzecorian's precepts in late 15 century DR, but the true fate of the Philosoflayer, whether he still remained or had been truly scourged from reality, was uncertain.