Maanzecorian (Dead)

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.

Description

Maanzecorian appeared as a 10‑foot-tall (3‑meter) illithid with purple-green skin and yellowed tusks on the sides of his tentacles.

Personality

Like his superior Ilsensine, the vain Philosoflayer believes 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 considers that there are 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 is 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. The Philosoflayer has a desire for omniscience so great as to be a risk to his own life.

Divine Realm

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

He also has a base for his spies and proxies near the Caverns of Thought in the Outlands known as the Rotting Oracle. The structure is half-sunk in an oily mire, and houses 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 attends 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 seems highly favorable, it is possible he will even appear to negotiate conflicts between mind flayers and other races.

Worshippers

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.
Pen’serre, a small illithid settlement roughly translated as "Place of Contemplative Study" busily analyzed the ramifications of Maanzecorian's death both on its own and for their race specifically around the mid-13th century DR. As part of their studies, the Awaiter Creed illithids sought to locate, retrieve, and preserve the remains of the Philosoflayer's library, a challenging task given that it was raided upon his death by various factions, scattering the contents across the multiverse.

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.

History

Little was known about Maanzecorian, and given that the illithids themselves were mysteries of the cosmos, it was practically impossible to discern the origins of him or Ilsensine.
Sometime in the mid‒14th 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.