Aboleths as important villains

[Sir_Chivalry]

So I recently started a new campaign, focused on running what I want to run and having fun with it. My players are on board and enthusiastic, enjoying the energy I'm bringing.

Part of what I want to do with this campaign is use the monsters I really love in D&D, with a focus on Rakshasa and Hags in the overarching plot both politically and as some final bosses. My third favourite monster is the Aboleth, but I find that they are harder to make a long-running enemy out of:

-They are confined to the water. There are abyssal flying versions but then you lose the creepy aquatic thing.
-They have at best one minion (Skum) which are low level and don't advance much and have no intermediate minions (being themselves mid-level threats in D&D taken out by Kraken)

So a cabal of aboleths, hags and rakshasa makes little sense, but I was wondering what thoughts the Playground had in making them last beyond "that water level with the fishmen minions"

Currently I have two nations at war, one a large empire (rakshasa and hag manipulation) and another a league of small feudal fiefdoms. One major lord in the feudal region is in league with the empire and is pressing their advantage under the assumption that the empire will make them ruler of the feudal region after the fact. With these disparate fiefs nearby to the coastline, perhaps Aboleth involvement comes in more subtle ways, with other lords opposing the empire recognizing the strength in exposing their soldiers to aboleth mucus, or striking deals with these primordial aberrations to scuttle imperial ships. It certainly would lead to a bleaker and more morally grey situation for the players to navigate.

Would the Corrupted template (exposed to great evil, generally strong but slow and stupid) be a good template for more specialized aboleth-corrupted types?

[King of Nowhere]

Just because their printed stats are meh, doesn't mean they cannot have exceptional individuals with many class levels. after all, humanoids are even more pityful by the book, and yet their high level characters are the most powerful beings in existance.

So you could have the aboleth leaders with 10-15 class levels. same goes for the skum. that would make them believable opponents at any level.

give them the spell "air breathing", which iis the acquatic equivalent of water breathing

[Sir_Chivalry]

Oh Aboleths can totally have class levels I agree, it's just that getting their bodies on land is painful slow (10ft movement speed) but a necklace of adaptation (or equivalent) will handle the water/air problem. Giving them something equivalent to boots of striding and springing (magical tattoos or aboleth runes) will bring them up to a dwarven/halfling level of movement on land but it's still going to likely be a "needs to be secret" creature because a small whale sized mucus smearing creature can't go everywhere like other monsters

Skum on the other hand are noted in advancement as only advancing by HD. I'd imagine class levels would be something of a new invention with aboleths, making their minions able to retain prior knowledge?

Does the indirect influencing idea sound like a decent plan or should they be more involved?

[Zaq]

There’s a saying at my table: one aboleth makes a major problem. Two aboleths make a campaign.

We play aboleths as super-masterminds. You know, your archetypical manipulative villain in the shadows with some incomprehensibly far-reaching plot. They’re basically Great Old Ones with ancestral memories, mind control magic, patience, and really high mental stats. And, y’know, a nice dose of forced-transformation body horror on tap, but that’s not why they’re great masterminds.

Yeah, the CR doesn’t really reflect “super-mastermind,” but the CR assumes you’re going toe-to-fin with it and that it’s basically alone. Masterminding isn’t necessarily based on CR. A mafia boss could be a low-level human aristocrat and could still be an effective and powerful villain even if he’d be guaranteed to lose a “fair” 1v1 slugfest. That’s not his power, you know? That’s how I like to play aboleths.

[Pippa the Pixie]

Well.....any monster in any book can be a minion. So, really, pick away.

I'd stick to slimy, tentacled, fishy monsters...but you don't have too. Templates are great too, like anything ooze related or water related or just creepy. Corropted is ''ok'', but not great.

They would work great with 'water bubbles" to float around in. Or you could creep it up by giving them say monster tentacled turttles with 'water pockets' to ride. Or snails. Or sharks....flying sharks.

Once you make an aboloth character, you can give them all sorts of magic items and or spells to over come the water problem.

Of course...you can also set the game under water too.

Maybe the aboloths travel around in gargantuan waves of animated water, water elementals and skuz(slimy undead water).

[DrMotives]

Isn't there some sort of golem made out of water & aboleth slime that they make? It's a very shoggoth-esque creature. Admittedly, golems aren't as scalable as even a skum, but they're there. Also, they make slaves with mind control. So there's a whole built-in way to have a weird, non-obvious villainous hierarchy, much like a doppelgangers, vampires, or other "mess with your head" type creatures.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Sir_Chivalry
My third favourite monster is the Aboleth, but I find that they are harder to make a long-running enemy out of....

If you want an example of how to use aboleths in a campaign, I recommend you take a look at the Ruins of Azlant adventure path from Pathfinder. That should give you some good ideas, not just for strategy but for some land-based minions as well.

[King of Nowhere]

Oh Aboleths can totally have class levels I agree, it's just that getting their bodies on land is painful slow (10ft movement speed) but a necklace of adaptation (or equivalent) will handle the water/air problem. Giving them something equivalent to boots of striding and springing (magical tattoos or aboleth runes) will bring them up to a dwarven/halfling level of movement on land but it's still going to likely be a "needs to be secret" creature because a small whale sized mucus smearing creature can't go everywhere like other monsters


why not simply a fly spell? air breathing + fly are all available to a mid-level aboleth wizard.

You could have a party of aboleth adventurers to mirror the pcs and be the long reach of the aboleth power.

Heck, I'm also running a campaign based on politics (though mine is humanoid-on-humanoid), and every major faction has some star adventurinng group that's loial to them for some reason. they would not be a major power without some loial high level adventurer.

[Quarian Rex]

-They are confined to the water. There are abyssal flying versions but then you lose the creepy aquatic thing.


Lords of Madness does have the Amphibious Aboleth.



These amphibious aboleths are identical to their aquatic kin, except that their land speed increases to 20 feet, their swim speed decreases to 40 feet, and they gain the amphibious special quality (meaning they can breathe air as well as water). They can survive indefinitely on land, and they dry out and succumb to the long dreaming only if they take enough nonlethal damage from thirst or starvation to be rendered unconscious.


Just read that entire chapter, it's a gold mine.

[Vaern]

Remember that hags come in 3 varieties, one of which has the aquatic subtype. A covey of hags often consists of one hag of each type, and it's not unreasonable that the sea hag would have contact with an aboleth while one or both of the two land-dwelling hags may be working with rakshasa (as the rakshasa, annis hag, and green hag all prefer marshes, albeit of different temperatures).

The aboleth and rakshasa are both lawful evil as well, making it reasonable that they may try gaining additional power by seeking out faustian pacts. They may come into contact with each other if they happen to deal with the same devil.

Also, I feel as though aboleths should have some kind of mechanic that lets them jack their intelligence up through the roof. Considering that they're supposed to inherit all of their parents' knowledge at birth and assimilate the memories of all they consume, it seems odd that their base intelligence should only be 15.

[KillianHawkeye]

Aboleths have natural skill with not just mind control, but with illusions as well. What this means is that you can have an aboleth BBEG as the mastermind behind an entire adventure and have the PCs not even meet him until the very end (or not at all, if you want them to be a recurring villain). They're very good at the "guy behind the curtain" kind of evil.

[Eldariel]

Note, standard Aboleth has pretty ****ty skills (particularly Knowledges) for an ancient creature with memories from the creation of the world and perfect memory. And pretty ****ty skills in general. Thus you could argue they're probably just series of offspring that coupled extremely young thus producing rather short and haphazard memories of little value, rather than the coupling of elder aboleths of any kind. They have listed room for advancement up to 24 HD. A gargantuan 24 HD Aboleth is already rather terrifying (and high CR), doubly so if it has Psion levels (Psionic Aboleths are pretty solid too though the default one might be more frightening due to the actual illusions it's capable of and the almost irresistible Su Enslave; trying to enter an aboleth lair is an exercise in futility without True Seeing and pretty horrifying even with it).

But yeah, advance them and see what happens. Aberrations advance 4 HD per CR so a 24 HD Aboleth is CR12 (extra from size increase) but with DC27+ Enslave (more if giving it normal or elite array), some actual skills, rather frightening melee and you should probably give it more various Psionics too (no guide on how to go about that but you have a pretty solid baseline).

[Vaern]

Aboleths have natural skill with not just mind control, but with illusions as well. What this means is that you can have an aboleth BBEG as the mastermind behind an entire adventure and have the PCs not even meet him until the very end (or not at all, if you want them to be a recurring villain). They're very good at the "guy behind the curtain" kind of evil.

The problem with their Enslave ability is that the subject gets a DC 17 will save every day and the effect is broken if more than a mile away from the aboleth. Its sphere of influence using just mind control is quite small and, on average, a creature with a +0 bonus to will saving throws will last less than a week under its control. Other than this, all of their spell-like abilities are strictly illusions and would not compel people to obey them. Ideally, their minions and/or allies should be willing to prevent these details from becoming problematic and their Enslave ability should be reserved for turning members of the party against each other once they finally come face to face with the aboleth.

[magic9mushroom]

Well, the most obvious thing the aboleths could do to make them an immediate threat would be some kind of ritual to raise the sea level. Another potential avenue of attack would be damming Underdark rivers to change which caverns are flooded, although that requires there to be people in the Underdark the PCs actually care about.

Regarding Enslave, I will note that 4th-level savant aboleths get True Enslave, which makes the duration permanent and removes the 1/day saving throw and range limit.

[Albions_Angel]

LoM states that Aboleths make easy, if somewhat careful, alliances with mindflayers. Aboleths and Mindflayers regularly come into conflict with Drow. Drow fight dwarfs. So do mindflayers.

Have your overworld campaign trucking along, and early on, drop hints that armed bands of dwarfs have been seen marching from hold to hold. There are murmers of war. Drow start making bolder attacks on the surface for slaves. Spin them off into a seemingly unrelated quest involving mind flayers. Keep doing that. Set mindflayers up as the big bad. Then the odd coastal town comes under attack from aquatic races. Mindflayers of Thoon can be a distraction, misdirect the players into thinking the regular flayers are out in force because the thoon-ites are driving them out.

Eventually, they notice that something is driving the flayers to attack drow, and displace them, which brings them into contact with the dwarfs and the surface dwellers. And whatever it is, is also driving the sea attacks. You could even have them go and talk to a known aboleth to see if it knows whats happening. And let it misdirect them. Trick them into working for it. Send them after a Kraken or something. Only later do they realize they are working for the very mastermind that set all this in motion.

On the enslavement front. LoM seems to indicate that they subjugated people by force a lot of the time. So their mind control powers arnt necessary 24/7. Just needed to initially break united fronts.

[Sir_Chivalry]

Okay so WOW I normally don't get advice this helpful I was expecting a couple posts but so far this thread has been really great

Zaq I'll take that on board, scheming is what hags and rakshasa do best and it's why I love aboleths too.

Pippa the Pixie Why do you feel Corrupted isn't a great template? Too general? Nothing really aboleth about it?

DrMotives and QuarianRex YES, there's what I missed. Cold icy water golems and amphibious aboleths, love it

Palanan I'll try to track down the adventure path. Any specific ones of the six parts I should try to find first if I can't find them all straight away?

Vaern well that certainly livened up the game last night! Skum, skum and more skum, and then the party was disturbed to find a sea hag among the enemies they were fighting. Really knocked the swashbuckler out cold (horrific appearance and evil eye) and the ranger who has favored enemy (monstrous humanoids [but really hags]) immediately got on board with these skum being a greater threat in her mind. I think adding that hag to the aboleth scenes and relating the other hags with the rakshasa environment really will enrich the game.

[King of Nowhere]

Well, the most obvious thing the aboleths could do to make them an immediate threat would be some kind of ritual to raise the sea level.

Forget fossil fuels, aboleths are the real responsible for the greenhouse effect:smallbiggrin:

[Segev]

A city-state on an island in the middle of a lake or river that is a haven of peace in this fomenting war - because it’s secret aboleth Master is better at scheming long-term than the rakshasa and hags - would be a good possible place to start.

Give it levels of psion and it can have Call To Mind to help with its knowledge skills, and Mind Seed to let it send minions beyond its mile Enslave reach. Thrallherd levels would also be useful, given that they control Believers at any range.

A Mind Seeded Believer wouldn’t stop being a Believer, either, so would be an ideal loyal representative.

Now you don’t need to sacrifice the creepy aquatic nature to send “the aboleth” out, and even if they kill him, it was just a possessed minion.

Maybe the aboleth has plans to sink cities or dig underwater tunnels that he’s slowly working to trick the rakshasa and hags into helping with by making them think underground tunnels are useful for sneaking around, and his slum are poised to flood them at the right time.

[thorr-kan]

A city-state on an island in the middle of a lake or river that is a haven of peace in this fomenting war - because it’s secret aboleth Master is better at scheming long-term than the rakshasa and hags - would be a good possible place to start.
Kobold Press published "From Shore to Sea," a PFRPG module with just this premise. It was legal for PFS play, for characters level 6.

[Segev]

Kobold Press published "From Shore to Sea," a PFRPG module with just this premise. It was legal for PFS play, for characters level 6.

*blink* Wow. I was just spitballing off the OP’s setting.

[daryen]

Palanan I'll try to track down the adventure path. Any specific ones of the six parts I should try to find first if I can't find them all straight away?

I am not he, but ...

The last one. That is where everything is revealed and explained. Also, in the post-adventure part where they talk about where you can go from the end of the campaign, they give some more (five?) examples of aboleth plots to work with.

[thorr-kan]

*blink* Wow. I was just spitballing off the OP’s setting.
With 45 years and hundreds of thousands of fans, these coincidences are gonna happen...

:smallbiggrin:

Here's the link to the PDF. Print long since sold out.
https://paizo.com/products/btpy8evj?Pathfinder-Module-From-Shore-to-Sea

An aquatic dungeon adventure for 6th-level Pathfinder Roleplaying Game characters.

They Come from Beneath the Sea!

The deep waters of the Hellmouth Gulf have long concealed ancient mysteries, both wondrous and terrible. But these secrets have been submerged for too long, and the remote coastal village of Blackcove has accidentally awoken a slumbering horror from a bygone age. Strange creatures now venture from beneath the waves to steal townsfolk away in the dark of night.

Can the PCs discover the fate of Blackcove’s lost villagers? What secrets still lie hidden on the mysterious, ruined island just offshore, and what now lurks in the flooded temples beneath the isle? And what horrific fate lies in store for those unfortunate souls who fall prey to the island's eldritch influence?

From Shore to Sea is an adventure for 6th-level characters, written for the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and compatible with the 3.5 edition of the world’s oldest RPG, and produced in collaboration with the patrons of Open Design. Inside you’ll find villagers slowly succumbing to the ancestral taint in their blood, tentacled abominations from the deep, debased fish-men, ancient Azlanti technology, and a secret stretching back millennia to the legendary empire of Azlant itself.

This adventure is set along the mysterious Hellmouth Gulf coast in the diabolical empire of Cheliax in the Pathfinder Chronicles campaign setting, but can be easily adapted for any game world.

Written by Brandon Hodge

Pathfinder Modules are 32-page, high-quality, full-color, adventures using the Open Game License to work with both the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game and the standard 3.5 fantasy RPG rules set. This Pathfinder Module includes four pre-made characters so players can jump right into the action, and full-color maps to enhance play.

ISBN 13: 978-1-60125-257-9

From Shore to Sea is sanctioned for use in Pathfinder Society Organized Play. Its Chronicle Sheet and additional rules for running this module are a free download (213 KB zip/PDF).

Note: This product is part of the Pathfinder Modules Subscription.
Full Disclosure: I and an Open Design patron of this project and a Wolgang Baur drooling fanboy. There's the smallest chance my judgement may not be objective.

[Mnemius]

I vaguely remember some aboleth with a plot to make stronger slaves in a 3rd or 3.5 edition book.

Had a party with a half-ogre barbarian. If the adventure had continued on, there was going to be an chance at a cursed girdle... and the aboleth going, yes, that will birth strong whatever it was.

[Sir_Chivalry]

Found the adventures paths, looks like skum advance like normal people in pathfinder, and looking at all the high level skum I think that might be the best way to play it.

The party really found Skum scary during game night, never realized what glass cannons they are. I might not lack for credible enemies for a bit now.

The idea about trying to sink the land and consume the coastline seems like a good short-term goal and threatens the lowlands like swamps much more which makes their manipulation of the hags and rakshasa all the more sweet.

[Segev]

Oh, I think chulls are also aboleth minions. The crab-clawed, Cthulhu-mawed things from the base monster manual.

[Eldariel]

Oh, I think chulls are also aboleth minions. The crab-clawed, Cthulhu-mawed things from the base monster manual.

Lords of Madness says Chuul were created by a crazy scientistarchwizard who was really into creating halfbreeds. The Wizard was promptly killed when he tried to take over the world but the Chuul he'd created and sent around the world subsisted and bred, giving raise to the lesser mortal creatures described in the MM (the originals are apparently the maximum advanced versions that also happen to be immortal). There are, of course, alternate histories in different sources.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Aboleths make very Lovecraftian behind-the-scenes horror monsters, where the protagonists aren't really sure what's going on until they come across some horror that finally opens their minds up to some horrible truth (preferably involving the Far Realm, somehow).

Have one or more aboleths in charge of corrupting an area -- subtly -- such that the characters (and their players) are constantly bombarded with little things that are not quite right about every situation they find themselves in. People are acting subtly wrong, the plants and animals in the area have strange things that they do which they shouldn't be. Even the air they breathe and the space they walk through is subtly off. Focus on making it seem creepy in a very subtle way, not "OMG TENTACLES!" all the time. Don't throw it in their faces; portray NPCs as not speaking quite right, animals acting like they've got minor spinal or brain damage without any visible wounds, are born with mild mutations here and there, and they act very un-animal-like, such as watching the party in a disconcerting manner when they're around (whether dogs indoors, flocks of birds outside, or deer/bears/wolves watching them in the forest, just...staring). Start slowly exposing the PCs to taint without telling them when they eat or drink stuff procured in the area, which results in upset stomachs and escalatingly insane nightmares. Spells cast in the area are corrupted by the taint; they still work as advertised, at first, but the effects start looking/sounding/feeling/smelling strange, with disturbing images, sounds, and sensations manifesting when they're cast.

Go play the beginning Resident Evil 4, where all the people and animals are acting strangely. Don't have an entire town attack them (until later in the campaign, when they're close to figuring out The Big Secret), but instead the town is acting like a brainwashed cult -- which, to be fair, they kind of are. Play it as a horror game, but one of the subtler ones at first. Go read some of the Lovecraftian Cthulu Mythos stories, and make use of the horror elements in them.

As far as the aboleth(s) go, try gestalting their racial HD with other classes to represent their racial memories. Factotum/chameleon (http://www.giantitp.com/forums/showthread.php?145669-Making-the-Chameleon-even-more-awesome-(PEACH)) is an especially good combo (ignore the racial issues), since it allows for a wide variety of abilities that you can switch up day to day. Perhaps a sprinkling of shadowcraft mage to help them warp space in funky ways. Aboleths are supposed to gain memories both from their ancestors and from the humanoids they eat, so having a wide variety of skills and abilities they can call on (as well as their racial ones), would be a good call. And they have great Int scores, so it definitely helps their survivability and numbers. You should also give them Faerie Mysteries Initiate, to grant them +Int to their hit points, as well.

But aboleths are very Cthulian, and they work well with incursions from the Far Realm. They could, in fact, be working to open portals to the Far Realm, which would explain all the taint and mutations and such. And they work best behind the scenes, corrupting the areas around them. You might even work one (or more) into an Elder Evils campaign. Maybe they're trying to become Elder Evils, fusing themselves together into some sort of aboleth rat king (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rat_king). Which, of course, will bring even more ruin and corruption on the land.

[Segev]

Most players are likely too savvy to not at least get suspicious, but introducing a "water breathing" potion that has the downside of not letting you breathe air while under its effects as a cheaper alternative to normal water breathing items would be an interesting early hint of something wrong. It's obviously brewed from diluted aboleth mucous, but doesn't have the permanent "can't breathe air" effect...at least, not at first. Maybe breathing gets slowly harder the more you use it, unless you're using it and breathing water. (Unless I'm misremembering and aboleth mucous only causes you to lose air breathing while you can breathe water, in which case, ignore the latter part; this still works well as a possibly-subtle hint that aboleths are present.)

[Elves]

Don't take the aboleths out of the water or make them airbreathing, that makes them much less creepy.

The sea hag connection mentioned above is a good way to connect hags and aboleths; as for rakshasa, their environment is listed as warm marshes, which could contain both hags and aboleths. With detect thoughts and shapechanging, a rakshasa could make a good asset and infiltrator for a scheming aboleth who can't themselves leave the water.


Random brainstorm:

Elder aboleths psionically mind-controlling the Leviathan (from EE).

"Making the Abzu (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abzu) rise" -- a flood that surges up from the seas of the Underdark, from vast underground water reservoirs, threatening to drown all land aboveground. This reminds me of the plot of this book (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_(Baxter_novel)). This scenario could first reveal itself by incursions and eventually exoduses of drow and other Underdark creatures into the surface world as they're forced upward. Though if you want to emphasize aboleths as schemers, this might lack subtlety.

You could combine the two by making the Leviathan cause seismic activity that unleashes the underground reservoirs. Of course, there could be other ways to cause this seismic activity, like various magical shenanigans. The aboleths might have spent centuries "nursing the earthquake".

At some point later in the game you could have the players make a voyage on the underground seas of the Underdark, into aboleth territory, perhaps in a submarine if the Underdark is entirely flooded by that point.

If you want to have a single aboleth lair, I'm reminded of JaronK's example of an aboleth lair in the Tier List, with lots of illusions and so on.

As for where the lair is set, you could use any creepy body of water...in the reservoir of a city's water supply, in a pool in the ancient caves beneath the castle whose king they are mind-controlling, in a black lake in a marsh, under a wishing well, in a shrine pool and so on, but presumably wherever it is you should have it connect to the Underdark or some other way for it to get around. The water supply idea isn't bad even if it's not very original.

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Swamps are typically creepy anyway, so make the area they're in a very large swamp, where they can have all sorts of psionically dominated minions, and they can move around in at will. They can be anywhere at any time; most PCs won't be able to maneuver well in the water, and swamps are well known for having fetid, very dirty water, so the party can't see below the water's surface, so they never know when or where they're going to be attacked. Really ramp up the paranoia. Weird things happen in swamps. It's a pretty well-known trope for a reason.

Perhaps throw some culture shock at your players to distract from the aboleth/Far Realm weirdness, like maybe start pushing some vodoun (voodoo) stuff into the campaign, with witch doctors and lots of casual necromancy mixed in to mask the aberrational weirdness going on.

[Sir_Chivalry]

Okay! Definitely completely reworking to make aboleths part of the hag/rakshasa conspiracy from the beginning and involve them in a much more sweeping plot! These are gold, thank you so much everyone!

[Zaq]

I once had an arc in which an aboleth (subtly, indirectly, and extremely intentionally) caused a fire in a port city. In this game, Vancian magic was extremely unstable and had a tendency to backfire spectacularly (the PCs were a special-ops unit dedicated to hunting down and shutting down users of this dangerous Vancian magic). Long story short, the aboleth goaded someone into casting quench, which backfired badly enough to flood the city. Which is exactly what the aboleth wanted all along.

...that made more sense in the game than when I write it out. But it’s still an example, I think.

[Palanan]

Originally Posted by Zaq
…that made more sense in the game than when I write it out.

Made sense to me just now. Casting Quench, get unexpected deluge, evil master plan advances, check.

But now I have an image of an aboleth in a pressurized steampunk hydrosuit, stalking on a dozen mechanical legs across the debris of a flooded city, heading inexorably inland to bring havoc and terror to the unsuspecting drylanders….

[MaxiDuRaritry]

Made sense to me just now. Casting Quench, get unexpected deluge, evil master plan advances, check.

But now I have an image of an aboleth in a pressurized steampunk hydrosuit, stalking on a dozen mechanical legs across the debris of a flooded city, heading inexorably inland to bring havoc and terror to the unsuspecting drylanders….And then comes THE VARGA (https://forums.sufficientvelocity.com/threads/taylor-varga-worm-luna-varga.32119/) to save the day!

Tekeli-li!