Rhith, the Illithilich Mastermind

"Trust me, my friend. All I wish is my freedom...and justice."
-Rhith, sweet-talking Hugh into trusting him
Rhith is an illithilich (mind flayer lich) who has risen to power by making his phylactery from a powerful magical artifact. While he has had his setbacks, he is currently at large and working in alliance with Lady Kemlar in pursuit of his goal to destroy Orcus, Demon Lord of the Undead, and assist her with her own mysterious motives. With centuries of magical knowledge and a matching amount of cunning, Rhith is one of the last creatures anyone would want as an enemy. But despite his questionable motives, he has often shown himself to be an honorable (albeit manipulative) individual who honors deals and shows gratitude towards those who help him, whether they did so willingly or at the end of the strings he pulls.
Table of Contents

History

Quest for the Quintus Gems Campaign

Before Lothal

When the Purple Quintus Gem was shattered, most assumed the pieces lost their magic. The mind flayer Rhith knew better and used the shards to create a vessel for a periapt, partnering with two other mind flayers to become alhoons. The trio fused the shattered artifact back together with molten gold, using prisoners originally intended to become mind flayers (the last resources of their wiped-out colony) as sacrifices to fuel a dark ritual and become undead.
With a combination of psionics, magic, and clever thinking, Rhith expanded his knowledge of magic and began gathering resources to grow more powerful. His skills proved potent enough to outlast his partners, who found their bodies slain and their souls trapped within the periapt after a short period of time. Meanwhile, Rhith appropriated an abandoned, isolated mansion and abducted any travelers unfortunate enough to get too close, draining their life force to increase his power and using their cadavers to create undead servants.
His plans were going well until the Morlocks showed up, using the Seeking Stone and Wang to track the Purple Quintus Gem. Ultimately defeated, Rhith's physical body was destroyed and his spirit became trapped within the gem. Their prizes secure, the Morlocks took the now-imprisoned Rhith with them as they returned to Lothal. But the ever clever Rhith wasted no time in planning his escape, battling his former partners inside the gem and absorbing their souls to begin not only regaining his power but enacting a plan to become something greater.

Shadows Unleashed Campaign

Prisoner of the Morlocks

When the Morlocks began experimenting with the Purple Quintus Gem, Rhith started sapping their life energy. They did not take kindly to this and sought an audience with Lady Kemlar Kemlar to find a solution. After much negotiation, she provided them with a shattered arrowhead created by the Enjeu Bow, charged with radiant magic. The Morlocks put Purple Quintus Gem in a squeezable box, using the arrowhead pieces as spikes to give Rhith a painful jolt of radiant magic anytime he proved uncooperative.
With open rebellion off the table, Rhith decided to bide his time until a new opportunity presented itself. This came when the Morlocks began converting gemstones into Gravestones, lesser copies of the Purple Quintus Gem. Rhith convinced the Morlocks that the sapped life energy was a side effect of the gem's power, one he could negate for them but keep intact for other users to weaken their adventurer enemies. He also found he could communicate telepathically with anyone touching a Gravestone over any distance.
And so he waited as the Morlocks began spreading the Gravestones around Lothal, knowing that adventurers would find them and be tempted by their power. Some were implanted into monsters for adventurers to defeat, some were sold in markets, and others were simply left lying around. It was one of these that the Headhunters first found in the treasure horde of a bandit camp and Rhith decided that Hugh Morris was the perfect person to help him.

Deceiving an Adventurer

Rhith pretended to be the Gravestone itself and began with promises of power, trying to coax Hugh into using the Gravestone's power to get out of tough situations. Hugh did this once, but felt exhausted afterward from his life energy being drained and refrained from doing so a second time. After several failed attempts to bribe Hugh with power, Rhith switched tactics and began acting as a friendly source of valuable information instead.
He began to provide information about the Morlocks and their Gravestones, slowly putting Hugh into the right position to destroy them. He started by spinning a tale that he was a copy of a greater artifact (sort of true) not meant for evil (false). And that he wished for the Morlocks to be destroyed (true) so that he could gain his freedom (true) to go back out into the world and do good (false).
Hugh later decided to use three Gravestones at once to weaken Gulto and save a village from being harvested into zombies. This knocked him unconscious and allowed Rhith to plant a mental seed in Hugh, maintaining a permanent connection to him. When he woke up, Rhith warned him about the evils of the Grave Orb that Chigiri recovered from Gulto, not wanting Mesogog to interfere with his plans.

One Mind, Many Voices

As the Headhunters continued to collect Gravestones, Rhith began speaking to each of them in different voices. He acted as if each Gravestone was its own person, disguising his voice with each stone referring to the others as 'brother' and 'sister'. As more adventurers around Lothal found Gravestones, Rhith began repeating similar stories to those he sensed had Good natures. He used his promises of power on the more selfish people and began to drain the life energy from Gravestone users across Lothal.
Rhith eventually began claiming to Hugh that the new Gravestones had no will of their own, using this lie to insinuate that Levira's experiments with the Gravestones were progressing. He began offering information more scarcely and ceased trying to convince Hugh to use the Gravestone's power completely, his attention more focused on gathering the life energy he needed to revive himself.
When Artie used three Gravestones and sacrificed himself to injure the Morlocks (including the freed Mesogog), Rhith absorbed most of his life energy and gained more than he needed to complete his revival. This did not escape Mesogog's attention, who reinforced the Purple Quintus Gem's prison to keep Rhith contained without compromising his own use of the artifact.

Common Enemies

Under new torture from Mesogog, Rhith became an unwilling assistant in making contingency plans to take down Lothal's greatest defenders. The military commanders, platinum-ranked adventurers, the Animal Lords, and anyone else with great power. But while Rhith assisted with this, he continued to help the Headhunters, working to ensure that the Morlocks defeat would come from people they did not consider a threat.
Rhith filled Hugh in on some of Mesogog's history and the demon prince's intention to marry Levira while the Headhunters mourned Artie. Unknown to their party, Rhith had protected Artie's soul from Levira's grasp in gratitude for Artie's unwitting assistance in Rhith's plans, allowing Artie to rejoin his wife in the Seven Heavens. He also revealed that the 7th Sword was also the first of The Four, weapons intended to take down The Destroyer. Though he did not mention that Mesogog was not the true Destroyer, leaving that fact unrevealed to keep Hugh motivated.
Rhith later convinced Hugh to let him speak to Lady Kemlar through a Gravestone, saying he had information she may be willing to trade for. He claimed it was a religious ceremony that prevented corpses from becoming undead. In reality, he told her ███████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████████. With Kemlar equally opposed to Mesogog, she accepted this boon even though she did not initially trust Rhith. Shortly thereafter, Kemlar bartered with Mesogog for a Gravestone of her own and used it to communicate with Rhith regularly. The two began making plans of their own as a new alliance started to form.

Laying the Foundation

Sufficiently fueled with life energy thanks to Artie, Rhith then began to absorb magical energy from Gravestone holders. The largest donor was Chigiri, who regularly summoned familiars and sacrificed them to his Gravestone to use its power without sapping his own vitality. His power growing, Rhith began to formulate a plan to complete his revival that would center on the one Morlock whose heart was not corrupted by Evil: Mira.
In Rhith's time as the Morlocks' prisoner, Mira was the only one who showed Rhith any kindness. It is true that he was originally resentful of her for being the one who struck the blow that destroyed his physical form. But in the time he was forced to spend around the Morlocks, Rhith observed that she was there only because her life debt to Mesogog demanded it. She was also the only one of them to never torture him and even gave false reports claiming she had carried out torture to placate her allies. Instead, they talked. And while it may be a stretch to say Rhith developed a real sense of friendship with her at this time, he did give Mira his respect.
When the Battle of the Prizyrie Mountains began, Rhith prepared to make his move. He observed the Headhunters on their trek up the cliffside, viewing the destruction of Mesogog's physical body (which Rhith chuckled at due to its mirroring of his former body's destruction) by Chigiri's hand. As they arrived at the peak of the mountain, Rhith exerted his influence over the Shadow Skulls stationed there to allow the Headhunters to pass by unhindered. This went unnoticed by the adventurers, who believed a plan of their own made the undead soldiers ignore them.
After Mesogog was destroyed for good, Rhith reached out to Mira. The two spoke about Levira's increasing instability and her threat to their mutual well-being. Mira already harbored many doubts and Rhith's revelation that Levira had always intended to betray Mesogog pushed the werecat over the edge. Whatever Rhith had planned, she was in.

Back with a Vengeance

First and foremost, Rhith needed a new body. He also wanted to see Levira destroyed, both for practical purposes and good old-fashioned revenge. So, he and Mira decided to kill two birds with one stone. When Levira ordered Mira and Nadira to the Abyss to recruit demon soldiers, Rhith & Mira saw their chance. Rhith whispered his plan into Mira's mind and she wasted no time beheading Nadira moments after the pair arrived in the Abyss, permanently destroying the succubus on her home plane. Returning to Levira's castle unobserved, she stole the Purple Quintus Gem and hid in the castle until the time was right.
That time came when the Headhunters made their assault on the castle and jumped into the Void for a final confrontation with Levira. When the corpse she possessed had taken too much damage, Levira abandoned it and fought the Headhunters in her true monstrous form, a creature made of living shadow. That was Mira's moment. She ran into the battlefield, dragged the corpse away from the fighting, and impaled the Purple Quintus Gem into it. The body began to convulse as the necromancy-soaked cadaver rippled with Rhith's power. By the time the Headhunters had truly destroyed Levira, the transformation was complete and Rhith stood in front of the adventurers in the flesh.
Rhith stared down the Headhunters...and thanked them. He admitted everything he had done to them. His manipulation of Hugh, absorbing life energy from both them and their fallen comrades, his orchestration of their progress against the Morlocks, all of it. But he also expressed his gratitude and with a bow, he wrapped an arm around Mira and teleported the two of them to safety while the Headhunters fled the crumbling castle.
Specifically, he teleported them to Lady Kemlar's mansion. Her servants were quick to admit their expected guests and just as he had done for the Headhunters, Rhith gave her a respectful bow as the two sat down to flesh out the next stages of their plans.

A New Alliance & An Unexpected Friendship

Rhith and Lady Kemlar quickly found common ground on a personal level as well as a professional one, first bonding over their mutual hatred of Orcus. The pair found their skillsets complimented each other with Lady Kemlar's mastery of ████████████ mixing well with Rhith's extensive study of arcane magic and the Weave. Rhith's primary concern was rebuilding his power base and ultimately his chief desire was to kill Orcus, though he pledged to assist Lady Kemlar with her goals simultaneously in return for her aid. What started as a purely business relationship soon turned into a genuine friendship between equals.

Tales of Tavern Town Campaign

Needing servants both for his own use and to showcase his skills to Lady Kemlar, Rhith hatched a plan to obtain a fair number of monsters that appeared humanoid that could be used as spies. Capturing a bandit, he implanted the man with an illithid tadpole and transformed the unfortunate victim into a mind flayer. Giving him a ring with the power of the alter self spell, the new mind flayer took the form of a dwarf as well as a dwarven name, Sindri.
Sindri's mission was to insert himself into the community of Tavern Town and become one of the settlements many barkeeps, where he could then enter the yearly Battle of the Bars competition. Sindri's goal was nearly disrupted when the local, well-connected man Amon T. Lado took a disliking to him and his three workers collecting the alcohol ingredients were mostly killed by Noxidus, the Green Shadow Dragon. But despite these setbacks, he managed to make a complete enough brew to win the competition and get the entire town blackout drunk. Once the citizens of Tavern Town were passed out and defenseless, Sindri released a horde of intellect devourers upon them. Rhith was pleasantly surprised that Sindri had managed to procure his own intellect devourers, saving the ones Rhith had prepared from more bandits for another time.
Though Sindri wanted to go to the communities surrounding Tavern Town to acquire additional resources, Rhith vetoed the idea after learning from his new minions that The Goose had been spotted in the area. He cast a gate spell to bring his new servants back to the Black Isles. As a reward for his success, Rhith used a dark ritual to transform Sindri from a standard mind flayer to an ulitharid while also promoting him to a more prominent position among Rhith's growing cadre of subordinates.