Aberrations- Help Me Use 'Em

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

Sometimes it might be just important to play up that you don't know everything.

The Mind Flayers want to block out the sun. Why? They don't even have a weakness to sunlight. So while you might now a Mind Flayers Cabal immediate goal - blocking out the sun - nobody can tell you why. It might help to have different NPCs with ideas and suggest that they are all wrong.
(Possible ideas might be:
- They don't have a weakness, but a higher being the Illithis serve have.
- They want to block out the sun so the stars can be seen all the time, giving them more power over the world
- They want to destroy the god Pelor who is using the power of the sun to keep rifts to the Far Realms sealed.

All these reasons might be interesting and understandeable. But yet they are wrong. If a Mind Flayer would be questioned (and would answer truthfully), he would just laugh at them.

Or maybe have a reason that is too terrible to consider:
- The Sun is actually a creature from the Far Realms. The Mind Flayers have been fighting it for millenia there, and destroying it here would mean significant process for them. Of course, Pelor is slowly corrupted by this and doesn't even notice. Or does he?

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

I like the idea of aberrations as colonisers. They seek to "terraform" new worlds into something more suitable for them but with enough of the original world remaining for them to be able to grow their flocks and herds of humans, elves etc....

Basically, alien, psychotic gardeners.

Maybe they dominate people because they first need to change their minds so they can change the Universe? Only this can allow them to change Pi to 3, a far more suitable number for denizens from the Far Realms.

 

[Derulbaskul]

Maybe they dominate people because they first need to change their minds so they can change the Universe? Only this can allow them to change Pi to 3, a far more suitable number for denizens from the Far Realms.

Good point.

They terraform the land but they also need the "psychic atmosphere" to be right. To get that right they need to reshape minds. Hehe... I live in Singapore so I understand that!

 

[Rechan]

There are two ideas that I think would make an interesting aberration campaign. One was mine, one was someone else's here whose name I forget.

The idea is this: The Real World is actually part of the Far Realms. The Old One who ruled over the Real World fell asleep, or grew comatose - and could not keep its realm unstable. Or by a fluke of probability, Lawfulness happened and spread. And slowly, order formed in the chaos. And from that order rose the World. So here you have a bubble of normalicy inside a sea of chaos. Or, from the Far Realms perspective, a cancerous tumor.

The other idea: The Far Realms, the plane itself, is a living thing, an entity so massive that it is hard to conceive. Thus, Aberrations of every stripe are actually organisms within that living thing. They function like white blood cells, nerves, parasites, helpful bacteria, sperm, digestive enzymes, etc.

To marry these two ideas together, the Far Realms has become ill due to the the Real World. Aberrations are agents of the body, either eradicating or trying to "heal" it back to "normal". They could be going in to try and wake up the Old One in charge, to get it to reassemble. They could be trying to eradicate the world in the first place.

Perhaps one of the PCs goals could be to expand Reality (like a virus or cancer), creating new worlds within the Far Realms to further weaken the entity/gain more forces/whathaveyou. Or to severely weaken the Far Realms' body as a whole, so it's too weak to fight them. Or they could be trying to separate themselves from the Far Realms entirely, to exist on their own.

 

[Nifft]

Maybe they dominate people because they first need to change their minds so they can change the Universe? Only this can allow them to change Pi to 3, a far more suitable number for denizens from the Far Realms.

While I like this idea, IMHO an aberration would probably like Pi just fine ... but might very well want to change the value of "3".

Cheers, -- N

 

[Mustrum_Ridcully]

While I like this idea, IMHO an aberration would probably like Pi just fine ... but might very well want to change the value of "3".

Cheers, -- N

Or that.

Neither is a world that humans can imagine...

 

[Nebulous]

Alien Motivations:

An earlier post gave me this idea, where mind flayers (or any other highly intelligent abberant species) were conducting experiments on adventurers to learn more about their races, either for exploitation or clinic evaluation or harvesting or measuring their martial prowess.

Anyway, my flash of an idea was to have the PCs in a creepy place where they all experience a moment of great disorientation. Maybe a gas or overwhelming vertigo or some other effect where they are stunned for what seems a brief amount of time.

Later, they find a cell where they see naked, cloned prisoners, exact replicas of themselves. But the prisoners are the REAL PCs, and the free ones are the cloned experiment, now going through the rat maze. This could potentially result in a TPK for the cloned party, especially if the DM wants to experiment with some truly lethal, lethal scenarios.

But i imagine that would bother a lot of players if you threw them up against impossible odds without first telling them their characters were expendable clones.

Anyway, i thought it would be an interesting twist if nothing else. Eventually the "real" PCs would have to escape their captors.

 

[Stormtalon]

The idea is this: The Real World is actually part of the Far Realms. The Old One who ruled over the Real World fell asleep, or grew comatose - and could not keep its realm unstable. Or by a fluke of probability, Lawfulness happened and spread. And slowly, order formed in the chaos. And from that order rose the World. So here you have a bubble of normalicy inside a sea of chaos. Or, from the Far Realms perspective, a cancerous tumor.

This one I like. In fact, since I'm on the verge of starting a campaign that will -- at later levels -- have a heavy focus on aberrations, it might just be useful as one of those things that the PCs don't know at all. And since this campaign is based on the idea of "Everything's normal, the usual adventures," then "How did things suddenly go so wrong??" and finally, "Wait, we made it WORSE???" having this concept being behind it all really works. Gives motivation to the apparent bad guy and a reason for acting the way he does.

Hmm, yummy. *YOINK*