Yaddithians

Mind flayers, i.e. illithids, are one of the intellectual property details that Wizards of the Coast were not willing to put into the public domain (I just checked the 3.5 and 5e SRDs to make sure, but I was pretty certain I was right.) That said, for some reason, Freeport has always had Cuttleback, the mind flayer pirate, and he was even statted up in "Denizens of Freeport." I'm not sure if they left Pramas alone because he used to work there and he knew them, or if he was just very careful about how he skirted the I/P. Of course, there are other ways around too; there's a DM's Guild campaign "Call of the Deep" which seems to be well-regarded which is a mind-flayer pirate themed campaign set in the Forgotten Realms.

I think there are plenty of ways around it, though. I had a Hero Forge library thing of a Yaddithian, a Lovecraftian race that are mentioned very briefly in "Through the Gates of the Silver Key." Although envisioned as a little bit more insectile than this, Lovecraft never gave great descriptions of most entities, so they are often illustrated very differently. You can see from the attached illustration why I think using them as an acceptable substitute of sorts for mind flayers would work for me.

Of course, I don't want them to be too similar to mind flayers, because that defeats the purpose. And Lovecraft didn't do enough with Yaddithians to make them useable as is; they're too vaguely described and nothing is known about what they do other than that they're from the planet Yaddith and they're great scientists and sorcerers in the Lovecraftian weirdo alien race kind of way.

So, I liked the library Yaddithian, and with just a little bit of modification, it worked pretty well for me.

But then I made my own Yaddithian from scratch too. It actually worked better, although maybe that's just because I perhaps messed up the alignment of the snout and couldn't quite get it to work. 

And in the spirit of Cuttleback the mind-flayer pirate, I even made a Yaddithian pirate, although I think the concept is actually pretty silly.

Not sure yet what I'm going to do with Yaddithians, or how I even want to make them fit, or what campaign I'd use them in, etc. But I'm getting a little excited about figuring that out.

Here's one final image.