Wow, that is an excellent article. I’ve been wanting to try and host an In-person game for a bit but the whole “8 laptops” thing is a bit cumbersome. I think there is definitely a viable solution there to let people play from the couch and just hot seat with a laptop while the game is up on the TV.
I use foundry and love it. I’ve switched to PF2E but ran 5e on there for about 2 years. It works great for doing a lot of automation for you and you can still throw up a background image for TotM scenes. Definitely my favorite method I’ve tried for our virtual group. Though when we have In-person sessions we still use foundry with eneryone on laptops because it’s so much easier.
Just omit either “well” or “actually”. Maybe swap both for “surprisingly” or “unfortunately” depending on the context of the correction. I understand the struggle :(
I think that’s possible and can certainly be your head canon or what you run at your table.
That said, I believe the connections between the two are entirely due to the githyanki’s enslavement by the illithids. Learning the wrong lessons from their oppressors is a sad, but not unbelievable, outcome. The note about aboleths is interesting but I’m not familiar enough with their lore to effectively speculate why they would not know about illithids - perhaps they just didn’t come into contact with them until the height of the illithid empire.
This kind of lore stuff is why I stick to homebrew tbh