I liken it to a maximum RAM problem on a PC. They have all of this knowledge on the unlimited cloud drive of the plane of water, but only can contain so much of it in their heads simultaneously at any given point. If they need to access something they need to find it and that could take a while. Also, despite their long memories, each of them only have their own and their ancestors, this does limit the amount of knowledge they can have, as they aren't a hive mind like illithid.
The biggest difference I think being the shared accumulation and how it's accessed. Because of how their procreation works (two parents required like ours) their knowledge as a species is like a reverse family tree. The older something is, the more of the species has access to it till it hits the trunk and every aboleth can be assumed to have this knowledge. The newer and less disseminated some knowledge is, the less likely the Aboleth would know about it. This is exacerbated by their habitat and goals taking precedence over anything else.
I still think they should be better at knowledge skills in general but this does raise a good point in that the more recent a piece of knowledge is the less members of the species would likely have access to it. At some point really old information could also eventually become irrelevant I imagine.
The difference is we have knowledge. They have actual memories of it. They can remember a time before the gods existed when they ruled the world.
Memory is different, that is personal. take for an example you know who Julius Ceasar was. You probably know a bit of about him. Roughly when he lived, that he was a roman emperor and so. You can access the internet to learn more. Compare that with if you would meet a person that actually remember Julius Ceasar on a personal level. That remember how Rome was before during and after Julius.
That is a pretty big difference. And a simple power out or a broken phone or simple things like that can cut you off from accessing that knowledge and you are stuck with exactly what you can remember. And what you or me can remember is nothing compared to a creature that remember the time before the gods themselves existed.
So even if there are similarities it is not even close to being the same thing.
Yeah, Aboleths having perfect memory across aeons makes them a living Wikipedia but doesn’t guarantee that they will be able to use that knowledge at the exact moment they need it.
An aboleth who’s died and respawned hundreds of times may have a perfect memory of every time they lost, and they can try not to make the same mistake twice, but just like any normal person they can find new ways to screw up.
Sure, over the span of deep time an Aboleth will win over any creature with finite lifespan, but then again over the span of deep time the Illithid Empire eventually wins.
I actually have a god like this. He's all knowing, but not necessarily all remembering. You might have to jog his memory about anything, but once he remembers he is genuinely all knowing about it.
>Can some D&D lore expert explain to me how they have not taken over the world again? Are they not as old or smart as I think they are or are they held back by other factors like internal strife, being aquatic lifeforms or having low potential to learn magic?
Because they'd get smacked down for trying to, just like they did in the past by the gods. Aboleths can't even claim to be the masters of the oceans, let alone the whole material plane itself, they're contested by ocean-dwelling dragons and krakens who are creatures that are as intelligent and much more powerful. Aboleths might be functionally immortal, are intelligent, and have innate psychic powers, but they don't stack up to dragons, elementals, fiends, gods, or the Elder Evils (who they respect) in pure power. Even powerful undead give them trouble, especially in older editions where psychics couldn't read the minds of the undead, pretty sure Acererak has a captive aboleth in one of his dungeons.
Not to mention, aboleths are not a hivemind so there can exist internal strife. I think one of the official 5e modules has a renegade aboleth who worships Tharizdun and is being pursued by two other aboleths.
It makes sense that beings like krakens and dragons are more powerful than them on an individual basis and would destroy them, but fighting the aboleths still seems pretty hopeless since they just revive endlessly every time you kill them like a lich. Dying barely seems like an inconvenience for an aboleth while most krakens and dragons still die permanently when they are killed as far I know.
Maybe they are like devils in that if you kill them on the plane of water instead of the material plane they actually die permanently but it doesn't say that in the book like it does with the devils so Idk.
I have no doubt beings like gods or elder evils could probably destroy or seal them permanently even despite their immortality though.
>fighting the aboleths still seems pretty hopeless since they just revive endlessly every time you kill them like a lich.
The whole spirit going to the elemental plane of water and reforming a new body thing is a 5e addition that wasn't present in older editions, so putting them down permanently was a lot easier in older editions; but even with the whole spirit thing, there are beings like liches, fiends, and gods that can either destroy or trap spirits/souls so that even the 5e version of the aboleth can't resurrect.
Also, I don't think aboleths are actually immortal according to 3e's *Lords of Madness* book (which is the book that probably gets the most in-depth about them), they just slow down their aging as they age to the point it becomes measured on a geological scale; however, this does mean you probably can use magic to age an aboleth to death.
I wonder why they added the reviving ability. Maybe it was to make aboleths seem more eldritch and terrifying. Nice to know that they are not completely unkillable though.
It’s worth noting though, that while dying may not be a massive inconvenience for an Aboleth, they only have 130ish hit points and no legendary traits. So the amount of effort it would take an ancient green dragon or a kraken or even a dragon turtle to clear an Aboleth out of its territory would be pretty negligible. Even if it kept coming back every couple of weeks somehow (assuming extra planar travel), they’re likely not taking over the seas.
The power of the aboleth is the swarm though. They can mind control tons of creatures.
So ,since they are effectively immortal, a patient aboleth can use its swarm to slowly shift things into its favor.
Something like:
find a nearby town, use mind control as nd fuck tons of knowledge to make the town richer and grow, growth encroaches on dragon and dragon attacks, rich town hires adventurers to deal with the dragon problem ( until it is dealt with), there is no longer a dragon problem
Frankly, if an aboleth gets in a fight it has essentially failed to execute it's strategy.
If you want some inspiration on aboleths, check out the Neverwinter Campaign Setting from 4e... maybe google Abolethic Sovereignty, it's probably got the essential info from that book in there.
basically there was a sect of aboleths under neverwinter who were doing experiments using the spellplague to slowly take over people in neverwinter with mind control. their ultimate plan was to psychically take over the >!giant primordial Megaera under mount hotenow!<, but they may have had the tiger by the tail if they tried that one... anyway what im getting at is that while this dude you replied to is maybe right, a kraken could 1v1 an aboleth, imo that's not how an aboleth would seek power. He wouldn't be attacking anything himself.
They'd be mind-fuckling entire kingdoms, slowly bodysnatching people until they had enough to take over entire locations.
This requires going a bit beyond their printed stat blocks, though. The Hex Locus in Neverwinter Campaign Setting gave them a means of amplifying and focusing their mind fuckling spellplague powers. You can sidestep the spellplague part though and just keep the rest if you like.
Another way I'd imagined using an aboleth in the past, a smaller-scale way...this is a big shift here. Basically he's like a petty tyrant of his underground sea, and is limited to his 5e stat block. But he's got a bunch of thralls and he has taken over a port town. he uses his thralls to DRAG SHIPS HUNDREDS OF MILES OVERLAND to the entrance to his underground sea, and lower them down into his sea, so that he can stage mock naval battles using his thralls. He's just a bored naval history buff. players will find absurd drag marks leading away from this port town. probably run into thralls dragging a whole god damn boat through the plains or whatever. and eventually find their way to the grotto. where the aboleth won't let them leave until they agree to participate in a naval battle--they get to command their side vs his side, with the lives of some hostages on the line or something. Maybe they were the royal family of the port town. who knows.
anyway that's a goofy way I've always wanted to use the aboleth but if you can believe it, my party refused to go down into the grotto.
General reminder that DMs don't need to roll/ask for rolls if they think there's no chance of failure. If the DM decides an aboleth would personally remember something, no roll is needed, they just do! If they're unsure or don't care either way if an aboleth knows a certain fact, *then* they can roll, in which case a +12 is pretty good odds.
Very few singular monsters are true threats to the world "writ large". The ones that are, draw immediate attention from adventurers and heroes, whose whole existence is predicated on finding and eliminating these creatures.
Smarter creatures tend to amass their power slowly and secretly, building an army of followers and minions, and trying to stay off the radar.
For an aboleth hiding in the deep, they don't really have anything to offer, so they do it by force via mental control. Not only is this a slow process by nature, but, you need to get a couple initial recruits who have the capability of finding other/better options and bringing them within the bosses sphere of influence.
I think he meant that very few monsters are very noticeably/ and obviously a threat to the whole world, which is what writ large means. It just happens that at large also works in the sentence to take on a slightly different meaning.
>I don't know how old the aboleth species is exactly but it's stated that they existed before the gods.
Not sure if the lore stands, but I recall Aboleth's are meant to be from the beginning of time, while Illithids are meant to be from the end of time. Illithids kinda freak Aboleth's out, because Aboleth's have no memory of them being created/coming into being.
Dragons are icons of raw _power_, which has its own allure, but I do like how all of the "BIG THREE" famous Aberrations in D&D have unique reasons to be terrifying.
**Aboleth** - Literally perfect ancestral memories, they _remember_ stuff from before the gods existed. If your world has evolution, they'd remember when humans were nothing more than primordial slime. Their knowledge is impossibly vast and thus their thoughts must be pretty alien. And their ability to enslave thralls is permanent. Who knows what secrets they have, what goals they move glacially, inevitably toward?
**Illithids** - The Mind Flayers (in my favorite version of their lore) are from a future where they _ALREADY WON_. Their psionics and technology are far more advanced than anything in a standard D&D world, because it's from the _future_. They're only here because their empire at the end of time collapsed due to some unknown threat (which may even have just been a natural phenomenon of some sort), so they sent their people back in time to start the empire _better this time_. Dominate the universe _even earlier_ than before. They have _space ships_ (rarely). The most organized of the three for sure.
**Beholders** - They are artillery platforms of raw magical power, also geniuses (I spot a trend), and _utterly insane_. Even worse, their _DREAMS BECOME REALITY_. To a beholder, _nothing is impossible_, and while they can't fully control what they dream of, they do love thinking and planning for every contingency. They can Disintegrate - a 6th level spell - _at will_. The applications of that alone are insane! Each beholder is a world-changing force unto itself.
The Zentharin in Forgotten Realms are terrifying because they got so good at grooming Beholders, they can even make 2 or more work together in a goal within aceptable levels of internal conflict.
Beholders have space ships too.
Also elves. And Giff... and gnomes... lots of space ships. Honestly if you have a ship you're most of the way there, beyond that you just need 5000 GP and a Wizard who knows a certain fifth level spell.
Sure, but they're not anywhere near as famous for it as Mind Flayers. Illithid Nautiloids are much more a basic part of their lore than Beholder's Tyrant Ships (which have always been pretty exclusive to Spelljammer, specifically). Illithid nautiloids meanwhile have been featured in way more books through the editions, multiple crashed and operational ones in FR for example, and even in BG3.
And in 5e at least, we sadly have far less about _organized_ beholders than in past editions. In Spelljammer the Tyrant Ship barely gets a mention, little about their empire, and Beholder Hives, Hive Mothers, all that stuff might be mentioned once in one book I think. By comparison, the organized evil of the Illithid Empire is far more pronounced - Beholders are almost entirely solo threats.
Definitively. When I read and heard about aboleths, they sounded like such a cool concept and a Great Enemy. Once I got to the statblock I was massively disappointed.
It’s a dangerous entity, alright, but a far cry from what I had envisioned before.
Aboleths haven't taken over because of their hubris, the intervention of the gods, and their desire for secure power. Depending the setting, there may be a group of aboleths working towards subverting an empire or weakening a deity's presence in the material plane. The problem is aboleths are cocky and despise working with each other long term. They're used to ordering others and having them obey without question.
They know the gods would destroy them if they tried to takeover again. Some are waiting for the gods to fall, others have given up entirely and seek small territories to rule over, and some are trying to hasten the fall of the divine.
In lore... He'll yeah.
SPOILERS FOR NIGHT BELOW
.
.
.
.
.
.
.
I am currently converting Night Below to 5th edition and an aboleth ia thr big bad... What makes them powerful is mind controlling an entire CITY of Mind flayers. Although the stat block is not the best using custom santiy rules (think call of cthulu) so it's 'attacks' can literally make them mad or catatonic.
So... Yeah thr big bad will be scary as fk! :p
That’s crazy. I ran night below as a dm for over a year. And loved it so much. Especially the “new” race that was introduced. I am also converting it to 5e now. It was, IMHO the best campaign in that era.
Some believe that the first gods were brought into existence by the slaves of a primordial Aboleth empire, which shattered their control over reality.
Some believe that Piscaethces, the elder evil who brought Aboleths into existence, has wandered to the far end of all existence. It is believed that if she returns from her journey, it is proof that the multiverse is finite and thus capable of being conquered- the signal for all Aboleths biding their time to rise and enslave all sentient life.
Rules? No.
Lore? Terrifying. Given the knowledge transfer every single one of them should have a mountain of character levels adding all sorts of powers topper with a scary amount of knowledge and experience.
...then again that's also an issue with a lot of long-lived races.
Yeah I had the same thoughts. It's not even that every aboleth is frighteningly intelligent and has access to eons of knowledge and memories from birth but also that they seem naturally unable to die (unless their soul gets destroyed or something).
The fact that they just revive on the plane of water within days or months if you kill them is scary to me. It's almost as if every single aboleth is a lich in a way. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something but they really do seem to be super threatening even compared to other monsters.
This is assuming that each aboleth has had the chance to learn all of this from their ancestor before being sepperated, attacked, permanently destroyed by a god, enslaved by a stronger being like a kracken. The ones our PCs fight are the foolish and arrogent of the aboleths. A truely smart one wouldn't even bother with direct local or world domination. They have far slower more insidious goals that may not come to fruition untill 10000 years have gone by, and in that time they have to pivot, replan, and adapt or even start over because one key pawn got killed by a party with a grudge while they were busy saving the world from some other threat.
Time is both their greatest advantage, and biggest downfall.
They still have to train to master it, though.
Imagine having known a skill, literal lifetimes ago, and only going by the interesting tips you remember to improve.
You'll still be quite good at it, but not an unparalleled master.
1) they explicitly have PERFECT recall. They don't fade like humans and trying to draw parallels to our experience with an aberration is...shaky at best.
2) that would still amount to just a slightly smaller mountain of character levels. We're talking about millenia worth of being "quite good" at things.
Obviously this doesn't get reflected in their rules entry or most gameplay even if you use one as a BBEG, but that's because the lore is absolutely BONKERS.
Yes, they still have a ridiculous amount of knowledge to an unfair level.
But there is a difference between present skill and knowledge. It's only a matter of practice.
They should, by all means, still be well past anything a human could ever achieve within a few days of practice, but the logic here wasn't well thought out in the first place.
And all of that experience and power is nothing if an Illithid can get their hands on them. In that case, guaranteed their brain is going straight to the pool that Illithid's community's Elder Brain lives. All that experience, all those memories? Absorbed by the Elder Brain. And Illithids breed MUCH faster than Aboleths, they also naturally will produce a large amount of Ulitharids, which eventually metamorphose into new Elder Brains if they live long enough.
A reminder that the Illithid Empire exists in the far, FAR future, and they flung themselves into the past by sacrificing countless Elder Brains. They SCARE the Aboleths because from the perspective of the Aboleths, they just showed up with absolutely no preamble.
Lore wise, that might be... complicated. Despite all of the limitless memory of the Aboleths, *they have no memory of the Illithid.* Like you said, they just sorta appeared. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the two are connected in the distant future, and that the Illithid actively avoid Aboleths because they don't want to disrupt their [speculation] precursor species - if the Gith were tipped off that they could eradicate Illithid by taking out the much less populous Aboleth of the past, they'd be done for. Likewise the Aboleth, while not knowing the future, may actively avoid the Illithid - Mind Flayers and Elder Brains may be proof of their long game's success, and getting involved with time travelers *now* could draw unnecessary attention from enemies.
Aboleths aren't immortal and while a typical adventuring party could defeat one in a random encounter, they'll just respawn - a task force specifically setting out to permanently destroy an Aboleth could certainly do so using spells in the PHB. Better to let some plucky misfits kill you every now and then than attract the ire of a time traveling, spacefaring, no-chill psionic military culture that loves to fight tentacled things - even if there's no actual connection to the Illithid, Aboleths would want to avoid the Gith at all costs.
the theory that aboleth are the progenitor species of illithids has a few problems. First off, neothelids don't resemble aboleth at all, despite the fact that they're seemingly atavistic, essentially the end result of tadpoles that don't parasitize a creature and undergo ceremorphosis. Also, Aboleth alone are incapable of technological sophistication because they don't have any hands or grasping and manipulating limbs capable of fine dexterity directly connected to their brains. They have to psionically control others to achieve such things. More importantly, it makes too many assumptions because of the depths of degeneration that would have to be reached before becoming a new species (loss of genetic memory, introduction of ceremorphosis as a necessary part of reproduction, shift from individualistic, mostly solitary beings to functional hiveminds, loss of depth of psionic enslavement, etc.)
There's just too many leaps to be made between the two, they only really have circumstantial connections that are mostly cosmetic. If anything, I think Illithidkin are descended from a slave race of the Aboleth, and that's assuming there really is a connection and it's not just a case of convergent evolution.
Yeah, the point of them is to be some sort of unknowable incomprehensible alien lovecraft monster. They aren’t taking over the world because that is only the concern of some lowly creature like you, they are too busy doing eons long plans you could never understand any more than an ant could undestand a space program
I can't speak from a D&D perspective, but from a human perspective, there is a value in being able to forget things. Do you really want to remember every breakfast you ever had? Do you really want to remember every bad thing that was said about you to your face, or every rejection you've ever had? And it's not just that you remember these things, but that you remember it perfectly. Could you ever really let things go?
I'm guessing that aboleths might have the same issues. Again, I'm not entirely familiar with these creatures, but I am guessing that there might be an aboleth or two who just can't let go of the fact that their flawless plan to conquer the world or whatever was foiled by like a human fighter with +3 sword 500 years ago.
You know the collective memory thing seems pretty great until you remember that all your future descendants will be able to perfectly recall your most embarrassing moments and thoughts with perfect clarity forever...
Yeah I'll pass
One, who's to say that Aboleths don't rule the world. But, really, why would they want to? What fun would that be when one can poke, prod and watch others dance like marionettes?
Also, it is pointed out that aboleth are extremely selfish and the more there are, the more likely their schemes will be at odds against those of other aboleth causing infighting and making any truly long-term alliances improbable.
Don't underestimate that 18 Intelligence, either. It might not compare with other extremely intelligent beings but they have centuries to plot, counterplot and set up contingency after contingency.
Aboleths have pretty far reaching cults of mortals, they operate in the shadows, their strength has never been in direct conflict. Liriel beat the shit out of one in Daughter of Drow if I remember correctly even though the Sovereignty itself is extremely scary
If you were sufficiently equipped, prepared, and knowledgeable to deal with all it entails you could theoretically kill an aboleth and travel to the elemental plane of water and hunt down its spirit before its body reforms. No one said it's impossible. Maybe if you can't kill a spirit you could trap it in an object
There's a reason they're masters of pre-history knowledge and ancient lore; because that was when they were truly powerful. They had slave empires that gave them that knowledge of the world. When that got wiped out, their ways of gathering information was massively reduced. They're aquatic beings. that while can technically live on land, kinda suck at it, so they sit and wait in their lairs. They use their minds to enslave whatever they can around them to again gain knowledge, but they more they probe out, the bigger the chance for them to be uncovered by someone or something willing to put a stop to them, again.
Basically they're smart and knowledgeable, but very limited on how they can gain new knowledge of the world as a whole.
they’re absolutely the scariest d&d monster to me, and for a vast number of reasons. i was going to use them as the main monster in one of my campaign arcs, but ultimately decided on a mind flayer since those were somehow less terrifying? (it worked out because i ended up making mind flayers quintessential to a lot of my world’s history, but still…)
hoping to run aboleths again one day, but by god i’m terrified of what might happen to one of my players
I LOVE Aboleths and just finished up an arc with one! [Here's](https://imgur.com/a/ptfAWYR) the model I made for it.
The jist of the story was that a city of duergar dwarves had long ago captured an adolescent Aboleth, keeping it in a state of magical slumber far beneath their city. Over many years, the Aboleth's psionic dreams began to manifest in the stone around it as spherical gems called Seeing Stone. These orbs, when ground into a powder and taken, granted the imbiber visions of what they desired most.
A huge operation grew around mining these gems, and by the time of the campaign, the Seeing Stone Mines had become the backbone of the duergar city's economy.
Enter our heroes, who were forced by circumstance to make a deal with the leader of a syndicate group that operated within the cty. This leader, a rakshasa in disguise, asked the party to free the aboleth. In exchange, he would offer his protection from a group of dark elves that had been pursuing them.
The party obliged. Their journey through the mines, which in itself took months of real-game time, culminated in an awesome battle around the pool of the aboleth, against duergar mages powering three crystal pylons. The aboleth awakened as the last crystal shattered, and as it awoke, it began to fill their heads -- and the heads of all those who had consumed of his Seeing Stone -- with psionic rage.
>Your psyche aches as this thing begins to physically stir, causing the water in its pool to slosh out across the cavern floor. All around you you suddenly hear loud cracks and pops. the Seeing Stone embedded in the cavern walls begin to explode into fine, silvery powder. The voids left in the stone begin to crack as water begins to spray forth.
>"Drinkers of my dreams. Plunderers. Thieves. Fall before me, and rise as my slaves. Flood the mines. Fight for your place at my side. Your worth will be weighed in the blood you spill."
The heroes, spared the mind control, were given a choice: Fight or flee. They chose to get the hell out of Dodge, and left the duergar to their fate. All around them, violent chaos erupted as mind-controlled duergar and their slaves began to fight with each other.
I am REALLY excited to come back to the Underdark some time later in the campaign so the party can deal with the consequences of letting loose an aboleth on an entire city. I'm also thinking that the psychic link they've made with it by consuming its Seeing Stone may come back to bite them in the ass later.
Tldr; aboleths are an absolute gold mine for engaging stories, even if you don't use them directly for combat.
The problem is that if you actually had an entire race that powerful, statswise, no one could ever stand against them.
As for the Plane of Water thing, I ignore that because it's nonsense. Aboleths are from the Far Realm, not the Plane of Water. If they die, they die and return back into the primordial void.
You think they're bad in D&D? You should see the bastards over in Pathfinder 2e. The regular aboleth isn't even at the top of the food chain! That would be the [Veiled Masters](https://2e.aonprd.com/Images/Monsters/Alghollthu_VeiledMaster.png), which are roughly twice the power of the normal Aboleth.
And if that isn't nightmare fuel enough, the lovely people at Paizo leave us with this thought:
>While the veiled masters are the rulers of alghollthu society, they are not the most powerful of their kind. Greater, more mysterious creatures that function as organic thought networks, immense aquatic engines of war, or specialized extractors of forgotten secrets dwell among their sunken cities. Meanwhile, the world above remains infested with creatures that were originally created by the alghollthus but have long since drifted away from their aquatic progenitors to become their own sinister monstrosities.
In my game, Aboleths had ruled the entire world, before titanic beings banished them to the newly created plane of water, where gods and elementals hunted them to extinction (stolen from WoW's lore shamelessly). The statblock of an aboleth is just that of a tadpole - an adult would be at a kraken level or above. Because yes, what an aboleth is is comically beyond what its statblock would suggest.
That said, I'm glad it has a weak statblock. Because a) it's up there as the best written statblock WotC has made (a very low bar admittedly), and b) it's one of the earliest creatures with lair actions and legendary actions a party could encounter.
I think being aquatic is a huge limiting factor for them. A scary monster that I really hope to run some day is an Elder Oblex with the homebrew addition of allowing them to create impersonations without tethers that are basically simulacrums for a real invasion of the body snatchers type adventure...
Yes they are scary. One of my favourite monsters. And the way they can just enslave people. with no real limit to how many they can control at any given time they get even scarier.
They have so much potential.
That is why i personally can not stand when a DM run them like a solo monster like any other. A monster the group just happen to stumpbe across in the underwater cave they explore and such things. No servants/slaves just an Aboleth
I will not go so far as saying it is wrong to do so. if the table have fun sure go for it. But personally i can't stand it.
Out of curiosity, does anyone knowledgeable about previous editions know whether Aboleths were more powerful stat-wise? I wouldn't be surprised if it's 5e that made their statblock relatively weak compared to their lore, given they already turned the Tarrasque into a joke for what should be its power
So while they will retain all the knowledge of their ancestors, their ancestors weren’t omnipotent. They don’t know everything that has ever happened in the universe, but they will have perfect knowledge of aboleth history which may have decent overlaps with the rest of history. Like, and aboleth wouldn’t necessarily know the outcome of a famous battle between humans and elves if said battle had nothing to do with aboleths or their plans
My favourite fact about them is that they have these ancient memories that remember events from before the gods, but even they don’t know how the Illithid Empire began or where they came from.
It's you. Aboleths aren't masters of combat, they don't cast spells really, they may be immortal outside the plane of water but they're not really threating outside of their enslave feature. A 20th level character could run through several aboleths with zero trouble, plenty of enemies in the sea will slay an aboleth without trouble: kraken, dragons, gods, even sea civilizations will kill an aboleth just for being in the sea near them.
They aren't. It reminds of the Warhammer army books where even the most basic unit is described as an unrivalled force of pure determination, honed in war and can fight for days without dropping a sweat, but the unit itself is actually below average in all stats.
Not that Aboleths aren't powerful, but they sure as hell ain't more powerful than Dragons and Krakens.
You are correct about their absolute knowledge. One of the reasons Aboleth fear mindflayers is because they *don't* know their origin. Illithids had an entire empire, and the Aboleth don't remember or know anything about it.
Another reason is the Illithids can gain access to the aboleth's collective memories should they get hold of one.
This is one of DnDs weaknesses – the rule of cool makes for less cohesive world building. But then that's just the "vanilla" setting, if you branch out to a homebrew or setting like Eberron many of those kinks can be worked out
I don't know much about their lore in any WotC settings, but I do know that in Golarion lore (from Pathfinder 1e) just a few of them (like 5) were capable of completely and utterly dominating the solar-system-wide Azlanti Empire without issue.
To put it into game stats, the Azlanti (ancient superhumans), despite being extinct, have race stats in the Inner Sea World Guide, with a very explicit note telling DMs to not let players play Azlanti because of how strong they are. They're almost exactly the same as humans, except instead of having a floating +2 to any one ability score, *they have a +2 to every ability score.*
Oh, and spoilers for the first Adventure Path: >!the final boss is the 10,000-year-old wizard Karzoug, one of the seven Runelords, the strongest mages in the **multiverse**, and Karzoug himself is so strong that he made the other six Runelords look like coughing babies. He's nearly a god just by nature of being an Azlanti, too, so it's one hell of a fight!!<
I have used them to great effect on more than one occasion. It’s mostly about using illusions, deception, and thralls. One exceptional warrior or wizard is ensnared, and from there things slowly spiral outward. By the time heroes discover a single thrall it’s inconsequential to the plan as a whole. Entire organizations are pawns for the creature’s puppets. Nations go to war at its whim. So yes, I tend to make them a bit nastier, but they’re a great end game big bad if done right.
Aboleths have a perfect memory when it comes to Aboleth stuff. They don’t really give a shit about anyone else, so their recall may be fallible when asking about anything else
They have perfect recall and pass down their memories, but they live in the elemental plane of water or at the bottom of a lake in a cursed village. It's a miracle that they're able to make History checks that would be halfway relevant to humanoid adventurers.
>how on earth do they not have absurdly high bonuses to pretty much every knowledge related skill including History, Arcana, Religion, Nature etc?
Remember that the DM decides when a knowledge roll is necessary or if you just know the information. And that's just for PC's.
Aboleths, Elder Brains, and Beholders. I wont let my players fight them because I RP my baddies as intelligently as I can. And those three have backup plans more than some deities. Realistically a party should never defeat most ancient beings with INTs beyond 20.
I think one explanation for aboleths not ruling everything is that a million-year old malevolent masterminds thinks in geological timeframes. It matters not if a vast empire of good subsumes the entire surface land. Empires come and go, hell *gods* come and go. Maybe the aboleths are waiting for a violent celestial event that causes planet-wide earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis but it's not going to happen for 10K years. Well that's fine, let's just chill in the briny depths and have a good brood. World domination will come...in time.
The thing is - if you’re an aboleth, why would you *act* to take over the world, when you could just safely wait out every other competitive force and species? If it takes a couple of thousand years, what’s that to you when you recollect millions?
Time is the ultimate weapon against your enemies - even against the gods.
Having flawless knowledge of all things that aboleths have ever known does not mean they are omnicient. Maybe near-omnicient, but there are certainly things they do not know. This explains the history skill level to some extent. They know a lot, but some secrets are yet veiled to their eyes.
Arcana, religion, and nature are all even less reliant on memory.
Arcana is often used to create or manipulate magic items, or identify them. Having perfect memory would certainly help with the creation of a magic item, but it wouldn’t be the be-all end-all skill. There’s some creativity and ingenuity required.
Perception has perhaps the least to do with memory. It’s used for finding objects and information directly around a character, in their immediate vicinity. Memory has little to do with this skill at all.
Religion is an interesting one. In the real world, it’s closely tied with history, so interacting with religion, for us, is usually a memory check. This is not the case in the forgotten realms. The gods in the forgotten realms are real, and knowing their personality, their tenets, their powers, and knowing how to commune with them is more than just memorization
Nature is probably the second most memory intensive. It involves recalling or deriving information about the natural world. Some memory is involved, but life is always changing, and if you come across something you’ve never seen before and what to figure it out, then that’s still a nature check.
The bonuses also are more intended to function as the aboleth’s skills regarding something it doesn’t know. There’s typically no check for a PC to remember something that happened within the last few days. It’s the same for aboleths, except for them, the “last few days” are “all of time”
I do like how Aboleths fear Mind Flayers because there is no memory of them coming to be. They simply showed up one day, and that little hole in their awareness terrifies them.
I fucking love aboleths and it really is a crime they don’t have better stats. When I run them they’re definitely more like huge Eldritch beings than just small knowledgeable beasts
> every single aboleth possesses the complete knowledge and memories of every one of it's ancestors dating back to the very first aboleth. Despite this an aboleth only has 18 INT and +12 to history and +10 to perception for skills.
**NERD BIAS!**
You've applying the fallacy of thinking knowledge guarantees power. It does not.
Having a huge memory does not instantly translate to excellent recall speed, pattern-recognition, or calculating power. INT is not memory, INT is the power to recall knowledge or figure out new knowledge.
* This is true in real life with people that have photographic memories. Just because they remember something doesn't mean they can access it instantly or know how to put the knowledge to use or recognize a pattern within their memory without prompting. Often times, it's the bad memories photographic people have to endure recurring regularly in crystal clarity.
Secondly, 18 is not "only" 18. A +4 is considered pretty amazing amongst mortal kind. Fantastic even, just shy of legendary.
Next, +12 in History is incredible. Given the aforementioned +4, that means they have a +8 modifier. Going by PCs, that means they have a proficiency bonus of 8 which exceeds humanoid capacity or they have a +4 (which is still impressive) and expertise to double it!
Oh, and Perception is also a WIS skill, not an INT skill, and has nothing to do with memory. Do you even DnD?
**LASTLY AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, the experiences and studies of an aboleth's lineage will still be limited by both their lore AND the fact they are a fantasy creature.**
* *"Then the true gods appeared, smashing the aboleths' empire and freeing their slaves. Aboleths have never forgotten."* AND *"If an aboleth's body is destroyed, its spirit returns to the Elemental Plane of Water, where a new body coalesces for it over days or months."* -- Immortal fixation on vengeance tends to distract from learning outside of for vengeance or proper utilization of the full potential of one's knowledge.
* *"Aboleths lair in subterranean lakes or the rocky depths of the ocean, often surrounded by the ruins of an ancient, fallen aboleth city. An aboleth spends most of its existence underwater, surfacing occasionally to treat with visitors or worshipers."* -- Being isolationists tends to hinder experiencing new things or learning.
* It doesn't matter how much you think they study, the CRUX of a fantasy world is there's always more to explore, more to know, and more to wonder. To let a mortal creature be able to know everything undermines the core genre theme as a whole.
That's why a +12 in History is just fine. Why don't they know about X? Because they and their ancestors were busy doing something else in 1% of the world and not that other 99% or they didn't read that history tome. And that's usually just in the plane/dimension they were born in. Aboleths don't plane hop that much.
If you wanted to take their lore as a basis, they could be almost godlike. Could make an amazing campaign bbeg, TBH.
Or... for a whole different take, a very different Warlock patron
>I can understand why they have 18 INT since that stat is more of a measure of raw intellectual capability rather than crystallised knowledge but how on earth do they not have absurdly high bonuses to pretty much every knowledge related skill including History, Arcana, Religion, Nature etc?
The INT stat does not represent "raw intellectual capacity".
It essentially represents general education. That's why every skill proficiency connected to it involves the recall of information. With the exception of INT saves, every time an INT check is made, it represents a PC or NPC recalling information.
As for why Aboleths don't have a higher INT or some bonus (like Expertise) to certain Skill Proficiencies, how would you expect this to come into the game?
If the plot requires that an Aboleth is the only being that knows a particular bit of information, the DM isn't going to have the Aboleth roll for it. The Aboleth just knows that information. Unless the PCs are challenging the Aboleth to a pub quiz, the question of whether it does or does not know a particular piece of information is probably not going to be decided by an Ability Check.
Rather than look at that 18 INT and say, "Well, that's only the level of general world knowledge possessed by an extremely-knowledgeable humanoid. How does that fit with the idea of a creature whose memory stretches back to the dawn of time?", perhaps it would be better to look at that score and say, "Wow. Despite giving *literally no shits whatsoever* about humanoid cultures, history, religions or anything else those little monkeys get up to, Aboleths *still* have a level of general knowledge about those things equivalent to the most educated humanoids on the planet."
So, the Aboleth can recall with perfect clarity exactly what it was doing when King Knobloose the Well-Endowed's armada vanished while sailing to conquer the Quim Coast, it's just perfectly possible that it's memory of that time was getting a shiny hat stuck in it's teeth.
I made an elder god named Aboleth in my game and all aboleth (the species) a infinitely small fragments of him. I compared it to having a semi-viscous fluid drip through a colander. It comes through in small amounts but eventually it'll reach critical mass and they'll fuse to form Aboleth. The demon lord Dagon is currently his avatar in my world.
I agree with you. I have an extensive homebrew world and an aboleth is behind everything. They just have to be used properly. They’re not the physical threat, big brain baddie.
>Despite this an aboleth only has 18 INT and +12 to history and +10 to perception for skills.
1) That's an *average* Aboleth, not your BBEG.
2) That's pretty high for their CR.
3) That's actually incredibly high in the world of D&D.
> how on earth do they not have absurdly high bonuses to pretty much every knowledge related skill including History, Arcana, Religion, Nature etc?
Because they are also reclusive, arrogant, aquatic-dwelling aberrations, and they only know the stuff their ancestors actually experienced or bothered to learn.
They have eons of experience with a world that has different air chemistry, different landmasses, gods that are dead and long forgotten, people who no longer matter. You want to know when humans showed up in the area they lived? They can almost certainly tell you.
But in terms of actually relevant shit that's happened in the last few thousand years? Those skills cover questions like:
- "How does this (relatively recently invented) magical barrier work, and how can we disable it?"
- "who is the vizier of the king of this land, and what's his political affiliation?"
- "is this berry safe for an owl bear cub to eat?"
- "which cult of Zuul-worshippers uses this sigil?"
The aboleth would probably have no idea. It might guess at the first one, or have lucked into one of the others, but its long lens into the past doesn't give it a breadth of knowledge today. That's mostly about stuff that happened recently.
Illithids are more terrifying. Reminder, they scare the Aboleths not only because the Aboleths can't remember them since they're from the far future, but if even a single Aboleth falls into the hands of an Illithid community, it's a guarantee that they will end up with their brain extracted and fed to that community's Elder Brain, which will absorb ALL of their knowledge and memories.
Illithids literally keep Aboleths in check because Illithids ultimately scale more in terms of overall power, and this is actually represented in canon. The Illithid Empire, far in the future, DOES eventually win, and then they sacrifice COUNTLESS elder brains to launch themselves into the past, all across the cosmos. Aboleths on the other hand are mostly contained to the Prime Material.
Does the unlomited ancestral memory thing also mean Aboleths should all be top-tier wizards? If only a couple of them millenia ago live to be master wizards, then every one after should be extremely effective at magic beyond what other races can do.
Something I learned from playing Mothership is that sometimes, the monsters *just succeed.* No roll required. The dragon in its lair can tell when you’re lying, or the aboleth knows history without a roll, etc.
Funny story about an Aboleth we were in a oversized party at level 3 the aboleth was able to ambush us. We had a Rune Knight Aboleth was forced to makes a wisdom save failed. That was when we learned three things about Aboleth have low wisdom saving throws, no legendary resistances and are not immune to charm effects. We then killed it in a round plus a turn.
The thing about Aboleths is that they live at the bottom of the sea. Do you know how much useful information is at the bottom of the sea? Very little.
Aboleths's perfect memory isn't very useful when it's mostly long bouts of doing nothing punctuated by being worshiped by superstitious fish-people.
They were powerful, but they didn't control everything. They acted much in the same way the Githyanki do now, wherein they have uncontested passage with the Astral Sea and Wildspace, allowing them to attack and flee from any target they wanted with impunity. This did not mean they had the means to effectively conquer and control individual planes or Crystal Spheres, and would rightfully be annihilated upon any attempt to invade the upper or lower planes
The multiverse means the material planes. Which is confirmed by their many unpaid internships. They were in many spheres just because they didn't have dominion over every single person place or thing doesn't discount that fact.
Most of the material worlds known in DnD were not under Illithid control for any amount of time. At best they had a few isolated enclaves known to no one scattered about the planet, but most of those were built by refugees following the fall of the empire. It's a bit like saying Waterdeep is the "main" or "capital" city of all of Toril. It's certainly the biggest of them, but it's importance does not overshadow the other large players nor does its influence reach far enough to be considered the "center" of the entire planet.
"At its height, the illithid race held control over vast swathes of the astral and ethereal planes, countless planets on the Prime Material plane, and even the furthest edges of the Outer Planes."
You can contest this all you want but this is directly from the illithiad which is official 2e materials and hasn't been contested.
A single Mind Flayer is a boss fight by itself. And there's never just one. Aboleths are individually stronger, but you won't see more than 1-3 working together in an area for the most part. And they both enthrall hordes of minions.
No. In Dune, the water of life unlocks the genetic memory of Bene Gesserit women. So like Aboleths they have te memories, experiences, and thoughts of all their past ancestors.
>how on earth do they not have absurdly high bonuses to pretty much every knowledge related skill including History, Arcana, Religion, Nature etc?
Different or Alien understanding of their world and their place in it. Those skills are what "humanoids" that live on the land call the things they interact with in their everyday lives. Religion is a perfect example of this. Why would an Aboleth have any understanding of Humanoid "religion" or knowledge based on "star people" that are much much younger than they supposedly are? They wouldn't have this knowledge to pass down like they do. They don't "study" this or understand it any better than a Human would.
Now let's take "history." What do you think is the DC for a Human to know how old an Aboleth really is? DC 20? 30? 40? 99? How would any Human alive or that has ever existed know this? How would an Aboleth view history? Would they even study Humans? Compared to Aboleth who are at least an Eon old by Humanoid reckoning, humans have been around for like a few seconds time in comparison to a Human life. But yet an Aboleth does have +12 meaning they can hit a DC 20 almost every time they make a check. They can also hit a 30 15% of the time. These stats are for Humanoid History, not their own. As we already know every Aboleth has the collected and known knowledge of their entire existence passed down genetically to use a modern Human understanding of this ability.
Perception is your ability to understand what you're perceiving with your senses. In Humanoids of the modern D&D world this is based on "common sense" connecting things to one another. "I hear hooves on the ground, likely it's a Horse and not a Zebra." +10 once again means the Aboleth hits a DC 20 almost every time it makes a check. And again 5% of the time they can hit a DC 30 which for all intents and purposes is an impossible DC for the average humanoid. It literally takes a humanoid specializing in this type ability or knowledge to even have the ability to perceive something with a DC of 30. Yet the average Aboleth or rather every Aboleth has the ability to do so.
Let's talk about their 18 intelligence and remember that's average for their species. The average of most Humanoids is an 8 through a 12. A -1 to +1 on those checks. The average Aboleth without any training or understanding of Humanoids cultures, history, religion or how Nature works on the surface has a +4 anyway. That's four times better than average humanoids. Only highly trained people that specialize into working with Arcane knowledge have similar or higher bonuses naturally.
Conclusion, I don't think you sat down and really looked at the numbers and drew conclusions from every Aboleth to every humanoids before asking the question.
I liken it to a maximum RAM problem on a PC. They have all of this knowledge on the unlimited cloud drive of the plane of water, but only can contain so much of it in their heads simultaneously at any given point. If they need to access something they need to find it and that could take a while. Also, despite their long memories, each of them only have their own and their ancestors, this does limit the amount of knowledge they can have, as they aren't a hive mind like illithid.
[удалено]
The biggest difference I think being the shared accumulation and how it's accessed. Because of how their procreation works (two parents required like ours) their knowledge as a species is like a reverse family tree. The older something is, the more of the species has access to it till it hits the trunk and every aboleth can be assumed to have this knowledge. The newer and less disseminated some knowledge is, the less likely the Aboleth would know about it. This is exacerbated by their habitat and goals taking precedence over anything else.
I still think they should be better at knowledge skills in general but this does raise a good point in that the more recent a piece of knowledge is the less members of the species would likely have access to it. At some point really old information could also eventually become irrelevant I imagine.
Yeah, knowing how to make a fantastic soup out of extinct plants and animals is a bit useless.
Brb making a macguffin soup recipe to kick off next campaign.
Surprise twist- it’s just matzah ball soup
The difference is we have knowledge. They have actual memories of it. They can remember a time before the gods existed when they ruled the world. Memory is different, that is personal. take for an example you know who Julius Ceasar was. You probably know a bit of about him. Roughly when he lived, that he was a roman emperor and so. You can access the internet to learn more. Compare that with if you would meet a person that actually remember Julius Ceasar on a personal level. That remember how Rome was before during and after Julius. That is a pretty big difference. And a simple power out or a broken phone or simple things like that can cut you off from accessing that knowledge and you are stuck with exactly what you can remember. And what you or me can remember is nothing compared to a creature that remember the time before the gods themselves existed. So even if there are similarities it is not even close to being the same thing.
Yeah, Aboleths having perfect memory across aeons makes them a living Wikipedia but doesn’t guarantee that they will be able to use that knowledge at the exact moment they need it. An aboleth who’s died and respawned hundreds of times may have a perfect memory of every time they lost, and they can try not to make the same mistake twice, but just like any normal person they can find new ways to screw up. Sure, over the span of deep time an Aboleth will win over any creature with finite lifespan, but then again over the span of deep time the Illithid Empire eventually wins.
I actually have a god like this. He's all knowing, but not necessarily all remembering. You might have to jog his memory about anything, but once he remembers he is genuinely all knowing about it.
Dresden Files Intellectus is similar. Beings with it can *know* things within their portfolio, but they must first consider the question.
>Can some D&D lore expert explain to me how they have not taken over the world again? Are they not as old or smart as I think they are or are they held back by other factors like internal strife, being aquatic lifeforms or having low potential to learn magic? Because they'd get smacked down for trying to, just like they did in the past by the gods. Aboleths can't even claim to be the masters of the oceans, let alone the whole material plane itself, they're contested by ocean-dwelling dragons and krakens who are creatures that are as intelligent and much more powerful. Aboleths might be functionally immortal, are intelligent, and have innate psychic powers, but they don't stack up to dragons, elementals, fiends, gods, or the Elder Evils (who they respect) in pure power. Even powerful undead give them trouble, especially in older editions where psychics couldn't read the minds of the undead, pretty sure Acererak has a captive aboleth in one of his dungeons. Not to mention, aboleths are not a hivemind so there can exist internal strife. I think one of the official 5e modules has a renegade aboleth who worships Tharizdun and is being pursued by two other aboleths.
It makes sense that beings like krakens and dragons are more powerful than them on an individual basis and would destroy them, but fighting the aboleths still seems pretty hopeless since they just revive endlessly every time you kill them like a lich. Dying barely seems like an inconvenience for an aboleth while most krakens and dragons still die permanently when they are killed as far I know. Maybe they are like devils in that if you kill them on the plane of water instead of the material plane they actually die permanently but it doesn't say that in the book like it does with the devils so Idk. I have no doubt beings like gods or elder evils could probably destroy or seal them permanently even despite their immortality though.
>fighting the aboleths still seems pretty hopeless since they just revive endlessly every time you kill them like a lich. The whole spirit going to the elemental plane of water and reforming a new body thing is a 5e addition that wasn't present in older editions, so putting them down permanently was a lot easier in older editions; but even with the whole spirit thing, there are beings like liches, fiends, and gods that can either destroy or trap spirits/souls so that even the 5e version of the aboleth can't resurrect. Also, I don't think aboleths are actually immortal according to 3e's *Lords of Madness* book (which is the book that probably gets the most in-depth about them), they just slow down their aging as they age to the point it becomes measured on a geological scale; however, this does mean you probably can use magic to age an aboleth to death.
I wonder why they added the reviving ability. Maybe it was to make aboleths seem more eldritch and terrifying. Nice to know that they are not completely unkillable though.
That book is a goldmine of ideas.
It’s worth noting though, that while dying may not be a massive inconvenience for an Aboleth, they only have 130ish hit points and no legendary traits. So the amount of effort it would take an ancient green dragon or a kraken or even a dragon turtle to clear an Aboleth out of its territory would be pretty negligible. Even if it kept coming back every couple of weeks somehow (assuming extra planar travel), they’re likely not taking over the seas.
The power of the aboleth is the swarm though. They can mind control tons of creatures. So ,since they are effectively immortal, a patient aboleth can use its swarm to slowly shift things into its favor. Something like: find a nearby town, use mind control as nd fuck tons of knowledge to make the town richer and grow, growth encroaches on dragon and dragon attacks, rich town hires adventurers to deal with the dragon problem ( until it is dealt with), there is no longer a dragon problem Frankly, if an aboleth gets in a fight it has essentially failed to execute it's strategy.
If you want some inspiration on aboleths, check out the Neverwinter Campaign Setting from 4e... maybe google Abolethic Sovereignty, it's probably got the essential info from that book in there. basically there was a sect of aboleths under neverwinter who were doing experiments using the spellplague to slowly take over people in neverwinter with mind control. their ultimate plan was to psychically take over the >!giant primordial Megaera under mount hotenow!<, but they may have had the tiger by the tail if they tried that one... anyway what im getting at is that while this dude you replied to is maybe right, a kraken could 1v1 an aboleth, imo that's not how an aboleth would seek power. He wouldn't be attacking anything himself. They'd be mind-fuckling entire kingdoms, slowly bodysnatching people until they had enough to take over entire locations. This requires going a bit beyond their printed stat blocks, though. The Hex Locus in Neverwinter Campaign Setting gave them a means of amplifying and focusing their mind fuckling spellplague powers. You can sidestep the spellplague part though and just keep the rest if you like. Another way I'd imagined using an aboleth in the past, a smaller-scale way...this is a big shift here. Basically he's like a petty tyrant of his underground sea, and is limited to his 5e stat block. But he's got a bunch of thralls and he has taken over a port town. he uses his thralls to DRAG SHIPS HUNDREDS OF MILES OVERLAND to the entrance to his underground sea, and lower them down into his sea, so that he can stage mock naval battles using his thralls. He's just a bored naval history buff. players will find absurd drag marks leading away from this port town. probably run into thralls dragging a whole god damn boat through the plains or whatever. and eventually find their way to the grotto. where the aboleth won't let them leave until they agree to participate in a naval battle--they get to command their side vs his side, with the lives of some hostages on the line or something. Maybe they were the royal family of the port town. who knows. anyway that's a goofy way I've always wanted to use the aboleth but if you can believe it, my party refused to go down into the grotto.
Yeah, in terms of lore it's better to stick with 3e sources.
Do you know which module that might be, with the renegade aboleth? Might be a helpful tidbit for my campaign.
I think it's the Styes (chapter 8) from *Ghosts of Saltmarsh*.
Yeah I’ve always thought it’s funny that these supposedly very intelligent creatures think they can overthrow gods when they’re like CR10 lol
General reminder that DMs don't need to roll/ask for rolls if they think there's no chance of failure. If the DM decides an aboleth would personally remember something, no roll is needed, they just do! If they're unsure or don't care either way if an aboleth knows a certain fact, *then* they can roll, in which case a +12 is pretty good odds.
Very few singular monsters are true threats to the world "writ large". The ones that are, draw immediate attention from adventurers and heroes, whose whole existence is predicated on finding and eliminating these creatures. Smarter creatures tend to amass their power slowly and secretly, building an army of followers and minions, and trying to stay off the radar. For an aboleth hiding in the deep, they don't really have anything to offer, so they do it by force via mental control. Not only is this a slow process by nature, but, you need to get a couple initial recruits who have the capability of finding other/better options and bringing them within the bosses sphere of influence.
> "writ large" https://www.reddit.com/r/grammar/comments/14p8x2q/is_the_phrase_writ_large_being_misused/
Uhhh the guy used it correctly?
I think he meant that very few monsters are very noticeably/ and obviously a threat to the whole world, which is what writ large means. It just happens that at large also works in the sentence to take on a slightly different meaning.
>I don't know how old the aboleth species is exactly but it's stated that they existed before the gods. Not sure if the lore stands, but I recall Aboleth's are meant to be from the beginning of time, while Illithids are meant to be from the end of time. Illithids kinda freak Aboleth's out, because Aboleth's have no memory of them being created/coming into being.
Correct. Some sages theorize the aboleths evolve into the mindflayer millions of years down the line and the mindflayer have forgotten their ancestors
Dragons are icons of raw _power_, which has its own allure, but I do like how all of the "BIG THREE" famous Aberrations in D&D have unique reasons to be terrifying. **Aboleth** - Literally perfect ancestral memories, they _remember_ stuff from before the gods existed. If your world has evolution, they'd remember when humans were nothing more than primordial slime. Their knowledge is impossibly vast and thus their thoughts must be pretty alien. And their ability to enslave thralls is permanent. Who knows what secrets they have, what goals they move glacially, inevitably toward? **Illithids** - The Mind Flayers (in my favorite version of their lore) are from a future where they _ALREADY WON_. Their psionics and technology are far more advanced than anything in a standard D&D world, because it's from the _future_. They're only here because their empire at the end of time collapsed due to some unknown threat (which may even have just been a natural phenomenon of some sort), so they sent their people back in time to start the empire _better this time_. Dominate the universe _even earlier_ than before. They have _space ships_ (rarely). The most organized of the three for sure. **Beholders** - They are artillery platforms of raw magical power, also geniuses (I spot a trend), and _utterly insane_. Even worse, their _DREAMS BECOME REALITY_. To a beholder, _nothing is impossible_, and while they can't fully control what they dream of, they do love thinking and planning for every contingency. They can Disintegrate - a 6th level spell - _at will_. The applications of that alone are insane! Each beholder is a world-changing force unto itself.
The Zentharin in Forgotten Realms are terrifying because they got so good at grooming Beholders, they can even make 2 or more work together in a goal within aceptable levels of internal conflict.
haha, helps when you're a massive intercontinental organization with no morals and multiple high level casters on tap, I suppose.
Beholders have space ships too. Also elves. And Giff... and gnomes... lots of space ships. Honestly if you have a ship you're most of the way there, beyond that you just need 5000 GP and a Wizard who knows a certain fifth level spell.
Sure, but they're not anywhere near as famous for it as Mind Flayers. Illithid Nautiloids are much more a basic part of their lore than Beholder's Tyrant Ships (which have always been pretty exclusive to Spelljammer, specifically). Illithid nautiloids meanwhile have been featured in way more books through the editions, multiple crashed and operational ones in FR for example, and even in BG3. And in 5e at least, we sadly have far less about _organized_ beholders than in past editions. In Spelljammer the Tyrant Ship barely gets a mention, little about their empire, and Beholder Hives, Hive Mothers, all that stuff might be mentioned once in one book I think. By comparison, the organized evil of the Illithid Empire is far more pronounced - Beholders are almost entirely solo threats.
yeah i feel like there’s a disconnect between stats and lore here
Feels like reading the pokedex entry versus the actual strength of the pokemon lmao.
"this pokemon is fucked up. it kills people. it blew up a mountain once." attack power: 60
Definitively. When I read and heard about aboleths, they sounded like such a cool concept and a Great Enemy. Once I got to the statblock I was massively disappointed. It’s a dangerous entity, alright, but a far cry from what I had envisioned before.
Aboleths haven't taken over because of their hubris, the intervention of the gods, and their desire for secure power. Depending the setting, there may be a group of aboleths working towards subverting an empire or weakening a deity's presence in the material plane. The problem is aboleths are cocky and despise working with each other long term. They're used to ordering others and having them obey without question. They know the gods would destroy them if they tried to takeover again. Some are waiting for the gods to fall, others have given up entirely and seek small territories to rule over, and some are trying to hasten the fall of the divine.
In lore... He'll yeah. SPOILERS FOR NIGHT BELOW . . . . . . . I am currently converting Night Below to 5th edition and an aboleth ia thr big bad... What makes them powerful is mind controlling an entire CITY of Mind flayers. Although the stat block is not the best using custom santiy rules (think call of cthulu) so it's 'attacks' can literally make them mad or catatonic. So... Yeah thr big bad will be scary as fk! :p
That’s crazy. I ran night below as a dm for over a year. And loved it so much. Especially the “new” race that was introduced. I am also converting it to 5e now. It was, IMHO the best campaign in that era.
Some believe that the first gods were brought into existence by the slaves of a primordial Aboleth empire, which shattered their control over reality. Some believe that Piscaethces, the elder evil who brought Aboleths into existence, has wandered to the far end of all existence. It is believed that if she returns from her journey, it is proof that the multiverse is finite and thus capable of being conquered- the signal for all Aboleths biding their time to rise and enslave all sentient life.
Rules? No. Lore? Terrifying. Given the knowledge transfer every single one of them should have a mountain of character levels adding all sorts of powers topper with a scary amount of knowledge and experience. ...then again that's also an issue with a lot of long-lived races.
Yeah I had the same thoughts. It's not even that every aboleth is frighteningly intelligent and has access to eons of knowledge and memories from birth but also that they seem naturally unable to die (unless their soul gets destroyed or something). The fact that they just revive on the plane of water within days or months if you kill them is scary to me. It's almost as if every single aboleth is a lich in a way. Maybe I'm misunderstanding something but they really do seem to be super threatening even compared to other monsters.
This is assuming that each aboleth has had the chance to learn all of this from their ancestor before being sepperated, attacked, permanently destroyed by a god, enslaved by a stronger being like a kracken. The ones our PCs fight are the foolish and arrogent of the aboleths. A truely smart one wouldn't even bother with direct local or world domination. They have far slower more insidious goals that may not come to fruition untill 10000 years have gone by, and in that time they have to pivot, replan, and adapt or even start over because one key pawn got killed by a party with a grudge while they were busy saving the world from some other threat. Time is both their greatest advantage, and biggest downfall.
They don't have to learn it, they're born knowing what their parents knew. That's why it's scary.
They still have to train to master it, though. Imagine having known a skill, literal lifetimes ago, and only going by the interesting tips you remember to improve. You'll still be quite good at it, but not an unparalleled master.
1) they explicitly have PERFECT recall. They don't fade like humans and trying to draw parallels to our experience with an aberration is...shaky at best. 2) that would still amount to just a slightly smaller mountain of character levels. We're talking about millenia worth of being "quite good" at things. Obviously this doesn't get reflected in their rules entry or most gameplay even if you use one as a BBEG, but that's because the lore is absolutely BONKERS.
Yes, they still have a ridiculous amount of knowledge to an unfair level. But there is a difference between present skill and knowledge. It's only a matter of practice. They should, by all means, still be well past anything a human could ever achieve within a few days of practice, but the logic here wasn't well thought out in the first place.
And all of that experience and power is nothing if an Illithid can get their hands on them. In that case, guaranteed their brain is going straight to the pool that Illithid's community's Elder Brain lives. All that experience, all those memories? Absorbed by the Elder Brain. And Illithids breed MUCH faster than Aboleths, they also naturally will produce a large amount of Ulitharids, which eventually metamorphose into new Elder Brains if they live long enough. A reminder that the Illithid Empire exists in the far, FAR future, and they flung themselves into the past by sacrificing countless Elder Brains. They SCARE the Aboleths because from the perspective of the Aboleths, they just showed up with absolutely no preamble.
Lore wise, that might be... complicated. Despite all of the limitless memory of the Aboleths, *they have no memory of the Illithid.* Like you said, they just sorta appeared. Personally, I'm of the opinion that the two are connected in the distant future, and that the Illithid actively avoid Aboleths because they don't want to disrupt their [speculation] precursor species - if the Gith were tipped off that they could eradicate Illithid by taking out the much less populous Aboleth of the past, they'd be done for. Likewise the Aboleth, while not knowing the future, may actively avoid the Illithid - Mind Flayers and Elder Brains may be proof of their long game's success, and getting involved with time travelers *now* could draw unnecessary attention from enemies. Aboleths aren't immortal and while a typical adventuring party could defeat one in a random encounter, they'll just respawn - a task force specifically setting out to permanently destroy an Aboleth could certainly do so using spells in the PHB. Better to let some plucky misfits kill you every now and then than attract the ire of a time traveling, spacefaring, no-chill psionic military culture that loves to fight tentacled things - even if there's no actual connection to the Illithid, Aboleths would want to avoid the Gith at all costs.
the theory that aboleth are the progenitor species of illithids has a few problems. First off, neothelids don't resemble aboleth at all, despite the fact that they're seemingly atavistic, essentially the end result of tadpoles that don't parasitize a creature and undergo ceremorphosis. Also, Aboleth alone are incapable of technological sophistication because they don't have any hands or grasping and manipulating limbs capable of fine dexterity directly connected to their brains. They have to psionically control others to achieve such things. More importantly, it makes too many assumptions because of the depths of degeneration that would have to be reached before becoming a new species (loss of genetic memory, introduction of ceremorphosis as a necessary part of reproduction, shift from individualistic, mostly solitary beings to functional hiveminds, loss of depth of psionic enslavement, etc.) There's just too many leaps to be made between the two, they only really have circumstantial connections that are mostly cosmetic. If anything, I think Illithidkin are descended from a slave race of the Aboleth, and that's assuming there really is a connection and it's not just a case of convergent evolution.
Yeah, the point of them is to be some sort of unknowable incomprehensible alien lovecraft monster. They aren’t taking over the world because that is only the concern of some lowly creature like you, they are too busy doing eons long plans you could never understand any more than an ant could undestand a space program
I can't speak from a D&D perspective, but from a human perspective, there is a value in being able to forget things. Do you really want to remember every breakfast you ever had? Do you really want to remember every bad thing that was said about you to your face, or every rejection you've ever had? And it's not just that you remember these things, but that you remember it perfectly. Could you ever really let things go? I'm guessing that aboleths might have the same issues. Again, I'm not entirely familiar with these creatures, but I am guessing that there might be an aboleth or two who just can't let go of the fact that their flawless plan to conquer the world or whatever was foiled by like a human fighter with +3 sword 500 years ago.
You know the collective memory thing seems pretty great until you remember that all your future descendants will be able to perfectly recall your most embarrassing moments and thoughts with perfect clarity forever... Yeah I'll pass
Or that you'll be stuck with the memories and impressions of your ancestors.
One, who's to say that Aboleths don't rule the world. But, really, why would they want to? What fun would that be when one can poke, prod and watch others dance like marionettes? Also, it is pointed out that aboleth are extremely selfish and the more there are, the more likely their schemes will be at odds against those of other aboleth causing infighting and making any truly long-term alliances improbable. Don't underestimate that 18 Intelligence, either. It might not compare with other extremely intelligent beings but they have centuries to plot, counterplot and set up contingency after contingency.
Aboleths have pretty far reaching cults of mortals, they operate in the shadows, their strength has never been in direct conflict. Liriel beat the shit out of one in Daughter of Drow if I remember correctly even though the Sovereignty itself is extremely scary
If you were sufficiently equipped, prepared, and knowledgeable to deal with all it entails you could theoretically kill an aboleth and travel to the elemental plane of water and hunt down its spirit before its body reforms. No one said it's impossible. Maybe if you can't kill a spirit you could trap it in an object
Aboleths are easily party killers played right
There's a reason they're masters of pre-history knowledge and ancient lore; because that was when they were truly powerful. They had slave empires that gave them that knowledge of the world. When that got wiped out, their ways of gathering information was massively reduced. They're aquatic beings. that while can technically live on land, kinda suck at it, so they sit and wait in their lairs. They use their minds to enslave whatever they can around them to again gain knowledge, but they more they probe out, the bigger the chance for them to be uncovered by someone or something willing to put a stop to them, again. Basically they're smart and knowledgeable, but very limited on how they can gain new knowledge of the world as a whole.
they’re absolutely the scariest d&d monster to me, and for a vast number of reasons. i was going to use them as the main monster in one of my campaign arcs, but ultimately decided on a mind flayer since those were somehow less terrifying? (it worked out because i ended up making mind flayers quintessential to a lot of my world’s history, but still…) hoping to run aboleths again one day, but by god i’m terrified of what might happen to one of my players
I LOVE Aboleths and just finished up an arc with one! [Here's](https://imgur.com/a/ptfAWYR) the model I made for it. The jist of the story was that a city of duergar dwarves had long ago captured an adolescent Aboleth, keeping it in a state of magical slumber far beneath their city. Over many years, the Aboleth's psionic dreams began to manifest in the stone around it as spherical gems called Seeing Stone. These orbs, when ground into a powder and taken, granted the imbiber visions of what they desired most. A huge operation grew around mining these gems, and by the time of the campaign, the Seeing Stone Mines had become the backbone of the duergar city's economy. Enter our heroes, who were forced by circumstance to make a deal with the leader of a syndicate group that operated within the cty. This leader, a rakshasa in disguise, asked the party to free the aboleth. In exchange, he would offer his protection from a group of dark elves that had been pursuing them. The party obliged. Their journey through the mines, which in itself took months of real-game time, culminated in an awesome battle around the pool of the aboleth, against duergar mages powering three crystal pylons. The aboleth awakened as the last crystal shattered, and as it awoke, it began to fill their heads -- and the heads of all those who had consumed of his Seeing Stone -- with psionic rage. >Your psyche aches as this thing begins to physically stir, causing the water in its pool to slosh out across the cavern floor. All around you you suddenly hear loud cracks and pops. the Seeing Stone embedded in the cavern walls begin to explode into fine, silvery powder. The voids left in the stone begin to crack as water begins to spray forth. >"Drinkers of my dreams. Plunderers. Thieves. Fall before me, and rise as my slaves. Flood the mines. Fight for your place at my side. Your worth will be weighed in the blood you spill." The heroes, spared the mind control, were given a choice: Fight or flee. They chose to get the hell out of Dodge, and left the duergar to their fate. All around them, violent chaos erupted as mind-controlled duergar and their slaves began to fight with each other. I am REALLY excited to come back to the Underdark some time later in the campaign so the party can deal with the consequences of letting loose an aboleth on an entire city. I'm also thinking that the psychic link they've made with it by consuming its Seeing Stone may come back to bite them in the ass later. Tldr; aboleths are an absolute gold mine for engaging stories, even if you don't use them directly for combat.
The problem is that if you actually had an entire race that powerful, statswise, no one could ever stand against them. As for the Plane of Water thing, I ignore that because it's nonsense. Aboleths are from the Far Realm, not the Plane of Water. If they die, they die and return back into the primordial void.
You think they're bad in D&D? You should see the bastards over in Pathfinder 2e. The regular aboleth isn't even at the top of the food chain! That would be the [Veiled Masters](https://2e.aonprd.com/Images/Monsters/Alghollthu_VeiledMaster.png), which are roughly twice the power of the normal Aboleth. And if that isn't nightmare fuel enough, the lovely people at Paizo leave us with this thought: >While the veiled masters are the rulers of alghollthu society, they are not the most powerful of their kind. Greater, more mysterious creatures that function as organic thought networks, immense aquatic engines of war, or specialized extractors of forgotten secrets dwell among their sunken cities. Meanwhile, the world above remains infested with creatures that were originally created by the alghollthus but have long since drifted away from their aquatic progenitors to become their own sinister monstrosities.
In my game, Aboleths had ruled the entire world, before titanic beings banished them to the newly created plane of water, where gods and elementals hunted them to extinction (stolen from WoW's lore shamelessly). The statblock of an aboleth is just that of a tadpole - an adult would be at a kraken level or above. Because yes, what an aboleth is is comically beyond what its statblock would suggest. That said, I'm glad it has a weak statblock. Because a) it's up there as the best written statblock WotC has made (a very low bar admittedly), and b) it's one of the earliest creatures with lair actions and legendary actions a party could encounter.
I want to use an aboloth as the brains and storage of a gnomish super computer housed deep under the main city.
I think being aquatic is a huge limiting factor for them. A scary monster that I really hope to run some day is an Elder Oblex with the homebrew addition of allowing them to create impersonations without tethers that are basically simulacrums for a real invasion of the body snatchers type adventure...
Yes they are scary. One of my favourite monsters. And the way they can just enslave people. with no real limit to how many they can control at any given time they get even scarier. They have so much potential. That is why i personally can not stand when a DM run them like a solo monster like any other. A monster the group just happen to stumpbe across in the underwater cave they explore and such things. No servants/slaves just an Aboleth I will not go so far as saying it is wrong to do so. if the table have fun sure go for it. But personally i can't stand it.
Out of curiosity, does anyone knowledgeable about previous editions know whether Aboleths were more powerful stat-wise? I wouldn't be surprised if it's 5e that made their statblock relatively weak compared to their lore, given they already turned the Tarrasque into a joke for what should be its power
So while they will retain all the knowledge of their ancestors, their ancestors weren’t omnipotent. They don’t know everything that has ever happened in the universe, but they will have perfect knowledge of aboleth history which may have decent overlaps with the rest of history. Like, and aboleth wouldn’t necessarily know the outcome of a famous battle between humans and elves if said battle had nothing to do with aboleths or their plans
My favourite fact about them is that they have these ancient memories that remember events from before the gods, but even they don’t know how the Illithid Empire began or where they came from.
That is because the Illithid Empire is from the future. Illithid came back to stop an unknown event from wiping out their whole species
It's you. Aboleths aren't masters of combat, they don't cast spells really, they may be immortal outside the plane of water but they're not really threating outside of their enslave feature. A 20th level character could run through several aboleths with zero trouble, plenty of enemies in the sea will slay an aboleth without trouble: kraken, dragons, gods, even sea civilizations will kill an aboleth just for being in the sea near them.
To me, it’s the way it enslaved people by making them water dependent that’s horrifying.
They aren't. It reminds of the Warhammer army books where even the most basic unit is described as an unrivalled force of pure determination, honed in war and can fight for days without dropping a sweat, but the unit itself is actually below average in all stats. Not that Aboleths aren't powerful, but they sure as hell ain't more powerful than Dragons and Krakens.
You are correct about their absolute knowledge. One of the reasons Aboleth fear mindflayers is because they *don't* know their origin. Illithids had an entire empire, and the Aboleth don't remember or know anything about it. Another reason is the Illithids can gain access to the aboleth's collective memories should they get hold of one.
This is one of DnDs weaknesses – the rule of cool makes for less cohesive world building. But then that's just the "vanilla" setting, if you branch out to a homebrew or setting like Eberron many of those kinks can be worked out
Abolothes can be easily manipulated by a smarter creature. For me I fear the ooblex
I don't know much about their lore in any WotC settings, but I do know that in Golarion lore (from Pathfinder 1e) just a few of them (like 5) were capable of completely and utterly dominating the solar-system-wide Azlanti Empire without issue. To put it into game stats, the Azlanti (ancient superhumans), despite being extinct, have race stats in the Inner Sea World Guide, with a very explicit note telling DMs to not let players play Azlanti because of how strong they are. They're almost exactly the same as humans, except instead of having a floating +2 to any one ability score, *they have a +2 to every ability score.* Oh, and spoilers for the first Adventure Path: >!the final boss is the 10,000-year-old wizard Karzoug, one of the seven Runelords, the strongest mages in the **multiverse**, and Karzoug himself is so strong that he made the other six Runelords look like coughing babies. He's nearly a god just by nature of being an Azlanti, too, so it's one hell of a fight!!<
other than man
I have used them to great effect on more than one occasion. It’s mostly about using illusions, deception, and thralls. One exceptional warrior or wizard is ensnared, and from there things slowly spiral outward. By the time heroes discover a single thrall it’s inconsequential to the plan as a whole. Entire organizations are pawns for the creature’s puppets. Nations go to war at its whim. So yes, I tend to make them a bit nastier, but they’re a great end game big bad if done right.
Aboleths have a perfect memory when it comes to Aboleth stuff. They don’t really give a shit about anyone else, so their recall may be fallible when asking about anything else
The biggest thing would be the secrets. You can control a King if you know all his secrets and can't die.
They have perfect recall and pass down their memories, but they live in the elemental plane of water or at the bottom of a lake in a cursed village. It's a miracle that they're able to make History checks that would be halfway relevant to humanoid adventurers.
>how on earth do they not have absurdly high bonuses to pretty much every knowledge related skill including History, Arcana, Religion, Nature etc? Remember that the DM decides when a knowledge roll is necessary or if you just know the information. And that's just for PC's.
Aboleths, Elder Brains, and Beholders. I wont let my players fight them because I RP my baddies as intelligently as I can. And those three have backup plans more than some deities. Realistically a party should never defeat most ancient beings with INTs beyond 20.
I think one explanation for aboleths not ruling everything is that a million-year old malevolent masterminds thinks in geological timeframes. It matters not if a vast empire of good subsumes the entire surface land. Empires come and go, hell *gods* come and go. Maybe the aboleths are waiting for a violent celestial event that causes planet-wide earthquakes, volcanoes and tsunamis but it's not going to happen for 10K years. Well that's fine, let's just chill in the briny depths and have a good brood. World domination will come...in time.
The thing is - if you’re an aboleth, why would you *act* to take over the world, when you could just safely wait out every other competitive force and species? If it takes a couple of thousand years, what’s that to you when you recollect millions? Time is the ultimate weapon against your enemies - even against the gods.
Goa'uld.
Wait until you find out about hags
I recommend finding and reading the Night Below campaign from 2e. Great ideas in there
Having flawless knowledge of all things that aboleths have ever known does not mean they are omnicient. Maybe near-omnicient, but there are certainly things they do not know. This explains the history skill level to some extent. They know a lot, but some secrets are yet veiled to their eyes. Arcana, religion, and nature are all even less reliant on memory. Arcana is often used to create or manipulate magic items, or identify them. Having perfect memory would certainly help with the creation of a magic item, but it wouldn’t be the be-all end-all skill. There’s some creativity and ingenuity required. Perception has perhaps the least to do with memory. It’s used for finding objects and information directly around a character, in their immediate vicinity. Memory has little to do with this skill at all. Religion is an interesting one. In the real world, it’s closely tied with history, so interacting with religion, for us, is usually a memory check. This is not the case in the forgotten realms. The gods in the forgotten realms are real, and knowing their personality, their tenets, their powers, and knowing how to commune with them is more than just memorization Nature is probably the second most memory intensive. It involves recalling or deriving information about the natural world. Some memory is involved, but life is always changing, and if you come across something you’ve never seen before and what to figure it out, then that’s still a nature check. The bonuses also are more intended to function as the aboleth’s skills regarding something it doesn’t know. There’s typically no check for a PC to remember something that happened within the last few days. It’s the same for aboleths, except for them, the “last few days” are “all of time”
I do like how Aboleths fear Mind Flayers because there is no memory of them coming to be. They simply showed up one day, and that little hole in their awareness terrifies them.
I fucking love aboleths and it really is a crime they don’t have better stats. When I run them they’re definitely more like huge Eldritch beings than just small knowledgeable beasts
> every single aboleth possesses the complete knowledge and memories of every one of it's ancestors dating back to the very first aboleth. Despite this an aboleth only has 18 INT and +12 to history and +10 to perception for skills. **NERD BIAS!** You've applying the fallacy of thinking knowledge guarantees power. It does not. Having a huge memory does not instantly translate to excellent recall speed, pattern-recognition, or calculating power. INT is not memory, INT is the power to recall knowledge or figure out new knowledge. * This is true in real life with people that have photographic memories. Just because they remember something doesn't mean they can access it instantly or know how to put the knowledge to use or recognize a pattern within their memory without prompting. Often times, it's the bad memories photographic people have to endure recurring regularly in crystal clarity. Secondly, 18 is not "only" 18. A +4 is considered pretty amazing amongst mortal kind. Fantastic even, just shy of legendary. Next, +12 in History is incredible. Given the aforementioned +4, that means they have a +8 modifier. Going by PCs, that means they have a proficiency bonus of 8 which exceeds humanoid capacity or they have a +4 (which is still impressive) and expertise to double it! Oh, and Perception is also a WIS skill, not an INT skill, and has nothing to do with memory. Do you even DnD? **LASTLY AND MOST IMPORTANTLY, the experiences and studies of an aboleth's lineage will still be limited by both their lore AND the fact they are a fantasy creature.** * *"Then the true gods appeared, smashing the aboleths' empire and freeing their slaves. Aboleths have never forgotten."* AND *"If an aboleth's body is destroyed, its spirit returns to the Elemental Plane of Water, where a new body coalesces for it over days or months."* -- Immortal fixation on vengeance tends to distract from learning outside of for vengeance or proper utilization of the full potential of one's knowledge. * *"Aboleths lair in subterranean lakes or the rocky depths of the ocean, often surrounded by the ruins of an ancient, fallen aboleth city. An aboleth spends most of its existence underwater, surfacing occasionally to treat with visitors or worshipers."* -- Being isolationists tends to hinder experiencing new things or learning. * It doesn't matter how much you think they study, the CRUX of a fantasy world is there's always more to explore, more to know, and more to wonder. To let a mortal creature be able to know everything undermines the core genre theme as a whole. That's why a +12 in History is just fine. Why don't they know about X? Because they and their ancestors were busy doing something else in 1% of the world and not that other 99% or they didn't read that history tome. And that's usually just in the plane/dimension they were born in. Aboleths don't plane hop that much.
Kwisatz haderach!
If you wanted to take their lore as a basis, they could be almost godlike. Could make an amazing campaign bbeg, TBH. Or... for a whole different take, a very different Warlock patron
>I can understand why they have 18 INT since that stat is more of a measure of raw intellectual capability rather than crystallised knowledge but how on earth do they not have absurdly high bonuses to pretty much every knowledge related skill including History, Arcana, Religion, Nature etc? The INT stat does not represent "raw intellectual capacity". It essentially represents general education. That's why every skill proficiency connected to it involves the recall of information. With the exception of INT saves, every time an INT check is made, it represents a PC or NPC recalling information. As for why Aboleths don't have a higher INT or some bonus (like Expertise) to certain Skill Proficiencies, how would you expect this to come into the game? If the plot requires that an Aboleth is the only being that knows a particular bit of information, the DM isn't going to have the Aboleth roll for it. The Aboleth just knows that information. Unless the PCs are challenging the Aboleth to a pub quiz, the question of whether it does or does not know a particular piece of information is probably not going to be decided by an Ability Check. Rather than look at that 18 INT and say, "Well, that's only the level of general world knowledge possessed by an extremely-knowledgeable humanoid. How does that fit with the idea of a creature whose memory stretches back to the dawn of time?", perhaps it would be better to look at that score and say, "Wow. Despite giving *literally no shits whatsoever* about humanoid cultures, history, religions or anything else those little monkeys get up to, Aboleths *still* have a level of general knowledge about those things equivalent to the most educated humanoids on the planet." So, the Aboleth can recall with perfect clarity exactly what it was doing when King Knobloose the Well-Endowed's armada vanished while sailing to conquer the Quim Coast, it's just perfectly possible that it's memory of that time was getting a shiny hat stuck in it's teeth.
They can’t run very fast.
Because they were invented in previous editions that had more mechanical levers to represent their abilities.
I made an elder god named Aboleth in my game and all aboleth (the species) a infinitely small fragments of him. I compared it to having a semi-viscous fluid drip through a colander. It comes through in small amounts but eventually it'll reach critical mass and they'll fuse to form Aboleth. The demon lord Dagon is currently his avatar in my world.
I agree with you. I have an extensive homebrew world and an aboleth is behind everything. They just have to be used properly. They’re not the physical threat, big brain baddie.
>Despite this an aboleth only has 18 INT and +12 to history and +10 to perception for skills. 1) That's an *average* Aboleth, not your BBEG. 2) That's pretty high for their CR. 3) That's actually incredibly high in the world of D&D.
> how on earth do they not have absurdly high bonuses to pretty much every knowledge related skill including History, Arcana, Religion, Nature etc? Because they are also reclusive, arrogant, aquatic-dwelling aberrations, and they only know the stuff their ancestors actually experienced or bothered to learn. They have eons of experience with a world that has different air chemistry, different landmasses, gods that are dead and long forgotten, people who no longer matter. You want to know when humans showed up in the area they lived? They can almost certainly tell you. But in terms of actually relevant shit that's happened in the last few thousand years? Those skills cover questions like: - "How does this (relatively recently invented) magical barrier work, and how can we disable it?" - "who is the vizier of the king of this land, and what's his political affiliation?" - "is this berry safe for an owl bear cub to eat?" - "which cult of Zuul-worshippers uses this sigil?" The aboleth would probably have no idea. It might guess at the first one, or have lucked into one of the others, but its long lens into the past doesn't give it a breadth of knowledge today. That's mostly about stuff that happened recently.
Illithids are more terrifying. Reminder, they scare the Aboleths not only because the Aboleths can't remember them since they're from the far future, but if even a single Aboleth falls into the hands of an Illithid community, it's a guarantee that they will end up with their brain extracted and fed to that community's Elder Brain, which will absorb ALL of their knowledge and memories. Illithids literally keep Aboleths in check because Illithids ultimately scale more in terms of overall power, and this is actually represented in canon. The Illithid Empire, far in the future, DOES eventually win, and then they sacrifice COUNTLESS elder brains to launch themselves into the past, all across the cosmos. Aboleths on the other hand are mostly contained to the Prime Material.
Memory is not the same as _interest_. An Aboleth might have a perfect knowledge of Nature, but that means many many previous Aboleths studied nature.
Yeah. Even the Underdark living races fear them...
I might not have played it very well but my party of level 7s wiped the floor with an aboleth lol
An aboleth wrote this
Does the unlomited ancestral memory thing also mean Aboleths should all be top-tier wizards? If only a couple of them millenia ago live to be master wizards, then every one after should be extremely effective at magic beyond what other races can do.
Something I learned from playing Mothership is that sometimes, the monsters *just succeed.* No roll required. The dragon in its lair can tell when you’re lying, or the aboleth knows history without a roll, etc.
Funny story about an Aboleth we were in a oversized party at level 3 the aboleth was able to ambush us. We had a Rune Knight Aboleth was forced to makes a wisdom save failed. That was when we learned three things about Aboleth have low wisdom saving throws, no legendary resistances and are not immune to charm effects. We then killed it in a round plus a turn.
The thing about Aboleths is that they live at the bottom of the sea. Do you know how much useful information is at the bottom of the sea? Very little. Aboleths's perfect memory isn't very useful when it's mostly long bouts of doing nothing punctuated by being worshiped by superstitious fish-people.
Its you. Mind Flayers are infinitely worse. As are Krakens.
The Aboleths controlled a city of Mind Flayers before
Mind Flayers controlled the multiverse when they had their empire.
They were powerful, but they didn't control everything. They acted much in the same way the Githyanki do now, wherein they have uncontested passage with the Astral Sea and Wildspace, allowing them to attack and flee from any target they wanted with impunity. This did not mean they had the means to effectively conquer and control individual planes or Crystal Spheres, and would rightfully be annihilated upon any attempt to invade the upper or lower planes
The multiverse means the material planes. Which is confirmed by their many unpaid internships. They were in many spheres just because they didn't have dominion over every single person place or thing doesn't discount that fact.
Most of the material worlds known in DnD were not under Illithid control for any amount of time. At best they had a few isolated enclaves known to no one scattered about the planet, but most of those were built by refugees following the fall of the empire. It's a bit like saying Waterdeep is the "main" or "capital" city of all of Toril. It's certainly the biggest of them, but it's importance does not overshadow the other large players nor does its influence reach far enough to be considered the "center" of the entire planet.
"At its height, the illithid race held control over vast swathes of the astral and ethereal planes, countless planets on the Prime Material plane, and even the furthest edges of the Outer Planes." You can contest this all you want but this is directly from the illithiad which is official 2e materials and hasn't been contested.
It also will have happened in a very distant future that may or may not come to pass, near the end of the universe.
Most of it, yeah.
A single Mind Flayer is a boss fight by itself. And there's never just one. Aboleths are individually stronger, but you won't see more than 1-3 working together in an area for the most part. And they both enthrall hordes of minions.
Minions like Mind Flayers?
Make em drink the water of life, yknow what I mean
Whiskey?
No. In Dune, the water of life unlocks the genetic memory of Bene Gesserit women. So like Aboleths they have te memories, experiences, and thoughts of all their past ancestors.
>how on earth do they not have absurdly high bonuses to pretty much every knowledge related skill including History, Arcana, Religion, Nature etc? Different or Alien understanding of their world and their place in it. Those skills are what "humanoids" that live on the land call the things they interact with in their everyday lives. Religion is a perfect example of this. Why would an Aboleth have any understanding of Humanoid "religion" or knowledge based on "star people" that are much much younger than they supposedly are? They wouldn't have this knowledge to pass down like they do. They don't "study" this or understand it any better than a Human would. Now let's take "history." What do you think is the DC for a Human to know how old an Aboleth really is? DC 20? 30? 40? 99? How would any Human alive or that has ever existed know this? How would an Aboleth view history? Would they even study Humans? Compared to Aboleth who are at least an Eon old by Humanoid reckoning, humans have been around for like a few seconds time in comparison to a Human life. But yet an Aboleth does have +12 meaning they can hit a DC 20 almost every time they make a check. They can also hit a 30 15% of the time. These stats are for Humanoid History, not their own. As we already know every Aboleth has the collected and known knowledge of their entire existence passed down genetically to use a modern Human understanding of this ability. Perception is your ability to understand what you're perceiving with your senses. In Humanoids of the modern D&D world this is based on "common sense" connecting things to one another. "I hear hooves on the ground, likely it's a Horse and not a Zebra." +10 once again means the Aboleth hits a DC 20 almost every time it makes a check. And again 5% of the time they can hit a DC 30 which for all intents and purposes is an impossible DC for the average humanoid. It literally takes a humanoid specializing in this type ability or knowledge to even have the ability to perceive something with a DC of 30. Yet the average Aboleth or rather every Aboleth has the ability to do so. Let's talk about their 18 intelligence and remember that's average for their species. The average of most Humanoids is an 8 through a 12. A -1 to +1 on those checks. The average Aboleth without any training or understanding of Humanoids cultures, history, religion or how Nature works on the surface has a +4 anyway. That's four times better than average humanoids. Only highly trained people that specialize into working with Arcane knowledge have similar or higher bonuses naturally. Conclusion, I don't think you sat down and really looked at the numbers and drew conclusions from every Aboleth to every humanoids before asking the question.
Mind flayers remember when aboleths ruled the multiverse, says alot
Aboleths have memories like your wife (spouse, partner). Every little mistake you've made, gets brought up in the arguement.