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View Full Version : [3.5] Of Aboleths and water piping.



Callos_DeTerran
2008-12-05, 12:58 AM
Recently I've come across a bit of a dilemma. My IRL group has been drastically cut down to either one or two people for most of the time and I am still the most likely candidate to be the DM for them/him. However I've gotten a bit tired of just running pre-made adventures since the level variance between the ones I play means that the characters are basically throwaways and the experiences only temporary. Hence my desire to finally get my own campaign up and running and for just such a campaign I've decided to turn to the only book tieing with Fiendish Codex II for the main focus, that being Aboleths and ethergaunts.

Why aboleths? Personally I think they are the coolest (besides the tsochari) of the great aberration races and one of the more challenging to confront. My problem lies in the actual stuff of the adventures, most of my ideas are the big picture instead of the little.

The general idea being that the ethergaunts and aboleths have formed a tentative alliance out of the desire for different goals with the same methods. Using a mixture of aboleth glyph magic and ethergaunt technology the two races have begun constructing massive gates to the Elemental Plane of Water that are connected to specially designed (and heated) tunnels and tubes to funnel the burning hot water and steam up to the surface world to shift climates and whatnot until all the land has been drowned leaving the aboleths with a new primordial sea to rule and the ethergaunts to inhabit above water with their flying pyramid-fortresses since most other races will likely be wiped out or will have relocated to avoid these drastic changes. Obviously the PC's/PCs' goal will be to stop these gates from opening and destroying the ones that already have been opened.

What I need are ideas for lower level adventures to lead into the big stuff as well as suggestions on how to use a CR system designed for 4 PCs instead of just one or two. Hell, even just bizarre/genius ideas for aboleth items and ethergaunt technological devices would be vasty appreciated.

Tacoma
2008-12-05, 01:29 AM
Mud (http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porong) Volcano (http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/06/sidoarjos_manmade_mud_volcano.html)

So the PCs are drawn to a mining town in an island chain that suddenly has all kinds of work available. Along the way they have to fend of desperate thieves and then the hazards of a short ocean trip during the Sunset Crab spawning season. The locals are all out harvesting crabs, but the Sahuagin in the area are murdering them to keep the crabs for themselves.

Once on the island the PCs can get work in and around the mines, perhaps dealing with monsters coming out of the jungle as the villages expand and start farming more space with slash and burn techniques.

Then the mining operation hits a bubble of hit air, injuring many miners and releasing strange squid-like creatures. Days later the grey mud begins to flow out of the mines. The PCs can loot, fight looters, or help people escape the inexorable mud flow. They can help build dikes and try to block the flow. Nothing seems to work. They're just pressing for time.

It's then the local Druids proclaim that the mud is poisonous and if it hits the ocean it will kill the spawning Sunset Crabs. A whole species will be lost forever. Now it's a race against time to build earthworks while the jungle monsters become even more of a pressing problem.

Finally mountain tribes from inland on the island come running down the riverbanks, fleeing what they describe as "great spouts of water coming out of the mountain hot springs" and flooding their villages. Within days a wall of water will wash down, carrying the tribesmen's tattered villages and the bodies of their dead. And down the rivers in the unending gushing torrent come horrible fish-creatures and horrible squid. The events are obviously connected.

The PCs might flee the island. Everyone else is. But when they reach the mainland and the biggest city where they started, they notice the river levels rising. Farmers from upland come down from the hills and mountains claiming the rivers are flooding mysteriously. The PCs look out across the span of ocean and see the mud streaking across the water, dead crabs on the beach, their beautiful orange starbursts covered in grey ooze.

And it is then the lords of the city approach them with an offer. They have experience with this, more than anyone else. The PCs will be outfitted with underwater exploration equipment and stout men from the navy with an experimental Apparatus of Kwalish that spans 40 feet from nose to tail. It might be a suicide mission. But if they venture below and succeed they will be praised as heroes and statues will be build of them. Songs will be sung. And the treasury of this merchant town can reward them with mansions and glittering prizes.

Thurbane
2008-12-05, 01:51 AM
No suggestions at this time, other than to say: awesome campaign idea!

trehek
2008-12-05, 07:23 AM
Early on the players might be confronted with aquatic humanoid raiders who are trying to escape impending aboleth enslavement. The aboleths might also send something up to scout and/or patrol the area of their operation.

Nice campaign idea indeed.

AslanCross
2008-12-05, 08:05 AM
1. Druids call for help when the nasty weather caused by the gates disturbs wildlife.
2. Weather causes mass migrations of lizardfolk, kobolds, and other reptilian races who don't mind raiding everything in their path.
3. The aboleths are kidnapping villagers to build slave armies.

arguskos
2008-12-05, 08:10 AM
Mud (http://http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porong) Volcano (http://www.boston.com/bigpicture/2008/06/sidoarjos_manmade_mud_volcano.html)

So the PCs are drawn to a mining town in an island chain that suddenly has all kinds of work available. Along the way they have to fend of desperate thieves and then the hazards of a short ocean trip during the Sunset Crab spawning season. The locals are all out harvesting crabs, but the Sahuagin in the area are murdering them to keep the crabs for themselves.

Once on the island the PCs can get work in and around the mines, perhaps dealing with monsters coming out of the jungle as the villages expand and start farming more space with slash and burn techniques.

Then the mining operation hits a bubble of hit air, injuring many miners and releasing strange squid-like creatures. Days later the grey mud begins to flow out of the mines. The PCs can loot, fight looters, or help people escape the inexorable mud flow. They can help build dikes and try to block the flow. Nothing seems to work. They're just pressing for time.

It's then the local Druids proclaim that the mud is poisonous and if it hits the ocean it will kill the spawning Sunset Crabs. A whole species will be lost forever. Now it's a race against time to build earthworks while the jungle monsters become even more of a pressing problem.

Finally mountain tribes from inland on the island come running down the riverbanks, fleeing what they describe as "great spouts of water coming out of the mountain hot springs" and flooding their villages. Within days a wall of water will wash down, carrying the tribesmen's tattered villages and the bodies of their dead. And down the rivers in the unending gushing torrent come horrible fish-creatures and horrible squid. The events are obviously connected.

The PCs might flee the island. Everyone else is. But when they reach the mainland and the biggest city where they started, they notice the river levels rising. Farmers from upland come down from the hills and mountains claiming the rivers are flooding mysteriously. The PCs look out across the span of ocean and see the mud streaking across the water, dead crabs on the beach, their beautiful orange starbursts covered in grey ooze.

And it is then the lords of the city approach them with an offer. They have experience with this, more than anyone else. The PCs will be outfitted with underwater exploration equipment and stout men from the navy with an experimental Apparatus of Kwalish that spans 40 feet from nose to tail. It might be a suicide mission. But if they venture below and succeed they will be praised as heroes and statues will be build of them. Songs will be sung. And the treasury of this merchant town can reward them with mansions and glittering prizes.
This, because DAMN, I want to play in this game now!!

Also, love ethergaunts. You might include a sojurn to the Ethereal Plane when the players reach a decent level.

Kaiyanwang
2008-12-05, 08:47 AM
1) awesome idea

2) refluff voidmind creature from FF - instead of a Mind Flayer tentacle, the creature is controlled by a device installed on it by the Ethergaunts after the creature is kidnapped

3) use futuristic weapons (antimatter rifle and so on) from DMG. Few charges, in the hands of the minions above.

Callos_DeTerran
2008-12-05, 01:25 PM
1) awesome idea

2) refluff voidmind creature from FF - instead of a Mind Flayer tentacle, the creature is controlled by a device installed on it by the Ethergaunts after the creature is kidnapped

3) use futuristic weapons (antimatter rifle and so on) from DMG. Few charges, in the hands of the minions above.

Are you sure that the voidmind creature is in the Fiend Folio? I can't find it there.

Tacoma
2008-12-05, 01:47 PM
It might be worthwhile to have the ethergaunts creating devices that the aboleth for whatever reason don't like. Maybe they're polluting the water or the vibrations are irritating to the aboleth's sensitive senses. But they're sticking together because conquering the world is worth a little bit of inconvenience.

But the ethergaunt are secretly testing and building weapons they can one day use against the aboleth if they turn on them. And the PCs might find some of these weapons in prototype stage. That is, the weapons require a charge-up period, exotic fuel, careful calibration, and break after too many uses.

Prometheus
2008-12-05, 03:58 PM
Wow, reminds me of my biggest campaign. It culminated in the players forcing their way onto an Ethergaunt air/spaceship (I homebrewed it) and taking it down before they used it to activate an artifact (which incidentally belonged to the Aboleths) that would annihilate the world. When the players transported themselves onto the space-ship, they found they had each been teleported to a different location on the spaceship and had to find one another. The paladin broke into the security center and used it to control a droid that was supposed to contact the fighter - who took one look at the thing and destroyed it with an alien ray-gun he had found in one of the storage crates. The cowardly rogue saw the security "cameras" moving and hid in a hall, but mustered the courage to pick one of the two doors when he saw pink ooze coming out of it. There the barbarian had been transported to the biological laboratories and had just broken the glass in the slimy tank when he had been incapacitated by two brain golems - the rogue was just in time. It wasn't too much a problem to contact everyone with notes, and I basically used the time to get the players acquainted with the idea of alien technology. The BBEG flew and was surrounded by a mantle of sparking cyborg wires that zapped anyone who got to close. He in turn, seemed to be possessed by an evil and powerful demon.

Unrelated in that same campaign, a gate to the Elemental Plane of Water was opened an set leaking out (it was in a well). They had been sent by the (good) trolls to fix the problem, had to kill a Rakshasa and a Bhut to get there, was aided by the Water Elementals and had to go to the Plane of Fire to solve the problem. In turns out that planar link worked to the advantage of the Plane of Fire (I could have said that it worked to the detriment as well) who arranged it by having political leverage over the manager of the planes, an Efreeti living in the City of Brass located on the Plane of Fire. He made a deal for them to stop the leak in order to take out his political opponents (they couldn't kill him because that would let all the planes crash into each other at once). The players were quite amazed that the seemingly unrelated chain of events all made sense in the end (if you don't think so, than I assure you it did).

I think your game needs another big political (or clandestine) force, perhaps ones that the PCs would feel uncomfortable working with but are the enemies of the Ethergaunts or the Aboleths (if for no other reason than the way they are executing it). Perhaps it gets tangled up in interplanar issues like I suggested earlier. Maybe the Ilithids despise one of the two creatures and see it as a threat to their own power. Maybe there is an island of fire giants who would get swallowed up by the flooding waters.

As for starting the game, I suggest have seemingly unrelated problems all relate to the issue at hand. The dwarves had long had their cliffsides protected by year-long stormy weather, but the new patterns have left them vulnerable. The reptile migration mentioned earlier was a good one, the players could defeat the first group as a generic "rampaging monster-folk" but later realize it is the tip of the ice-berg. Mysterious disappearances occur among powerful wizards/druids/clerics/rulers or what have you. A cult springs up among barbarian tribes related either to "angelic-demonic beings", "bright sky lights", or "the man whose words seem to persuade all". Make a big point about the humanoid cultures fighting each other over petty matters and wrap the PCs up into it, only to have humanity band together when they realize the real problem at hand (or like it my campaign, some of the human nations defect and submit to the new power). The ethergaunts need an important magic item and either send the PCs to look for it (via a go-between) or break in to a well-guarded place to steal it (maybe the PCs happen to be there to attempt an interception and maybe they are blamed for it!).

Callos_DeTerran
2008-12-06, 12:09 AM
The problem with having multiple seemingly un-related events that tie into the bigger story is that my IRL players wouldn't just assume there was a connection and act on it. They'd literally just assume it was coincidence and move on with their lives if they even got involved.

More importantly, if they got to the end and heard all the combining threads, I don't think they would appreciate or find entertainment in knowing everything was tied together. Some, but not worth the effort of actually doing so.

hamishspence
2008-12-06, 06:42 AM
Voidmind creatures are in MM3.

Kaiyanwang
2008-12-06, 05:46 PM
My mistake. Apologies (I hope you like the ideas anyway).

hamishspence
2008-12-06, 05:54 PM
FF does have half-illithids though.

3Power
2008-12-06, 08:02 PM
This is a campaign idea I built around an aboleth but never got to use:

The backstory timeline goes like this:

*Male Drow Wizard becomes Alienist
*Alienist, being absent minded and not paying attention, falls prey to an aboleth. Aboleth absorbs the knowledge of the Alienist, but due to it's abberant nature, is not affected by the madness. The aboleth immediately gains all the abilities of the alienist prestige class (but none of the spellcasting levels) and none of the penalties.
* the combination of the sanity of the aboleth and the incomprehensible secrets of the alienist allows the aboleth to discover abilities even the alienist couldn't, including the secret to dominating other aberrations.
*the aboleth uses this ability to enslave other aboleths, and then other underdark abberations, before declaring war on the other underdark races.
*After a while, the aboleth controls a pretty large section of the underdark, and names himself the Abberant King.
*It is then that the Abberant King sends out a psychic beacon throughout the material plane, to lure even more abberations to him so that he may conquer the rest of the underdark, and then the world above.
*The PCs likely first get involved when reports of surface abberations (such as those 3-handed ogre things) start being lured by the beacon, causing them to raze villages and such for easy sustenance while they continue on their journey to the nearest underdark entrance.
*The campaign ends when the abberant king is defeated once and for all, and his hold on the various other abberations are broken.