For those who venture into the Underdark, and find the Myconid Camp, you can speak to a Hobgoblin Trader. After speaking to this creature, you will find out he’s part of a intelligence guild, and his good friend is a Illithid. However, this Illithid is curious about the tadpole in your brain. If you’re in the market for trusting an Illithid as a potential cure to your tadpole problem, you will get the quest Help Omeluum Investigate the Parasite. Here is our walkthrough for completing the quest, including the follow up options after you complete the first task.

Help Omeluum Investigate the Parasite Walkthrough¶

When you accept the quest, you’ll get tasked with finding two mushrooms called the Tongue of Madness and the Timmask Spores. Both of these mushrooms are present inside the Arcane Tower.

To get to the Arcane Tower, you need to make your way over to the beach of the Underdark. Follow the pathway south from the Myconid Colony, and eventually, you’ll see a dirt road going down towards a beach with a few destroyed shanty town houses. Once you make your way over to the beach, look for a wooden bridge pathway that takes you west. This pathway will lead over to an area with some plants, and with a direct pathway to the Arcane Tower.

Once you arrive, you need to be mindful of some Arcane Turrets that guard the tower. These will auto track you if they have line of sight of you. So, you can either use a potion of invisibility, or something like Pass Without Trace, which will allow you to bypass the sight lines of the turrets and enter the Arcane Tower. The other option is to put players in turn based mode and have them sprint to cover.

Now you have two options to enter.

1. Mushroom Rock Wall Path
2. Drop down from the Balcony

You can either have a character with high strength to jump across the orange mushrooms that take your around the stone rockwalls, and around towards the tower - you can find the starting point near the blacksmith area of the tower. Or, have your party sneak through into the tower door, go to a balcony, then jump onto the purple mushrooms growing out of the wall in the tower. Either are fine. But, if you do take the orange mushroom exterior route, you will need to reactive to the tower’s elevator, which you do by placing a Sussur bulb from the garden inside the Power Generator on the ground floor of the Arcane Tower. The other method allows you to get what you need and then teleport out if you’re only interested in completing the Help Omeluum Investigate the Parasite quest.

Taking the first route is slightly longer, yet is the safer route, while Route 2 will have you take more fall damage. Either option is up to you.

If you’re interested in a full Arcane Tower walkthrough, we have that too. But, be warned, most of it doesn’t have much else to do with this quest. There’s some really good loot though, like the Staff of Arcane Blessing and the Light of Creation, which are very good weapons both of which we deem to be two of the best items in Baldur’s Gate 3 Act 1.

Tongue of Madness & Timmask Spore locations in Baldur’s Gate 3.¶

Now you’re inside the Arcane Tower, and you’ve managed to get to the second floor (or first floor if you’re in the UK), you will need to look for the mushrooms. The Tongue of Madness location, and Timmask spore locations can both be found on this level. For clarity, the floor you need to be on is the floor where the mushroom garden patches are.

Per the Timmask Spore location, you can find three of them on a shelf in the northwest corner of the floor. Meanwhile, the Tongue of Madness location are in the farmer’s patch of the giant orange mushrooms on the southeast side of the level.

Now you’ve got them, you can either carry on completing the Arcane Tower while you’re here. Or, you can fast travel straight back to the Myconid town as it has a fast travel point on the map.

Help Omeluum Investigate the Parasite: Part 2¶

On your return to the Illithid, you can now tell him you have the ingredients you need. Once you hand them over, he will give you a drink. If decide to drink the potion, you will need to make a few saving throws to make the experience a lot easier, as you are under some heavy psychosis. Omeluum did warn you after all.

The types of checks you’re detailing with are typically either Wisdom or Intellect saving throws. So, be prepared to have someone like a Druid, Cleric, Ranger, Wizard take the potion for the best odds of passing these checks. If you have items lying around on you like the Warped Headband of Intellect, or some intellect or wisdom buffing support spells, saving throw modifiers like Bardic Inspiration, Bless, Resistance, Githyanki’s Astral Knowledge, etc then now is the time to use them.

When you roll your successes, Omeluum tells you about how the creature is super resistant, and it’s nothing he has seen before. The other solution is a very powerful ring he has called the Ring of Mind-Shielding, which dampens the psyonic of Illithids, which can nerf the tadpole. You can get it a few ways, You can either buy it from him, or you can pass a check to get it as a reward. You can either intimidate him, recount an intellectual or performance type check of what happened on the Nautiloid. If you pass the very high score, you’ll get the ring If not, you will tell him nothing that Omeluum doesn’t already know. At that point, you can only buy it, which will cost 133 gold.

The Ring of Mind Shielding comes with the power to block the Illithid tadpole powers you have. As for its function as an item, it comes with Shelter, granting saving throws against Charmed effects. Which is a niche defensive ring option to use in combat.

Once that’s done, you can complete the Help Omeluum Investigate the Parasite in BG3.