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Message: <blockquote data-quote="paradox42" data-source="post: 3695263" data-attributes="member: 29746">My homebrew features over 200,000 years of prior history before the present day, and among other things I postulated that waaaay back at the beginning of the world the Creator Gods made three sapient races to start it all. Elves were the end result of primate evolution, dragons came out of dinosaurs, and the aboleths evolved from something unknown in the seas. These three races eventually gave rise to every other race the setting featured before the relatively recent catastrophe that makes my setting post-apocalyptic (and after which I have lots of mutant animals rising to fill various niches, such as the Tabaxi and Thri-Kreen). My world backstory postulates that during the same war when Drow were split from the original Elf culture, and the split between Chromatic and Metallic dragons occurred, the aboleths too split down alignment lines. The evil side won the seas, so the good side were forced to adapt to land life- and did so by using their psionic and biological powers to permanently alter themselves into illithid form. Eventually the evil side figured out how they did it, and sent up a race of evil illithids- the Mind Flayers- after them.So, my illithids are direct descendants of the aboleths- somewhat like Mouseferatu suggested after Lords of Madness in that thread rycanada linked to- and I even give them three eyes because of that ancestry. The third one- in the middle of the forehead- has both Low-Light and Darkvision in 3E (in previous editions it had both Infra- and Ultravision), and as such it's exquisitely sensitive to visible light and usually kept tightly closed when other races are around so that the illithids look basically humanoid as they usually do. This means that I altered the physiology of illithids considerably from canon after the Illithiad hit the scene- my world's illithids don't spawn using the Ceremorphosis process, and the actual Mind Flayers aren't nutritionally required to eat brain matter- they're just addicted to it (I even came up with mechanics for "withdrawal" if one of them tries to "go sober"). It also means there's a race of non-evil illithids running around, which I've had several players make characters from in my 3E games. I even have one in each of my currently running games now.Actual aboleths still fill a similar niche in my setting as they do in D&D canon- they're aquatic slavemasters and use their alien minds and psionics to hatch plots of dizzying complexity when they're so inclined. The thing I don't have is the idea that they came from the Far Realm originally, though I do have history that most of the race was banished to the Far Realm for about 100 millennia and only recently (about 2000 years ago) was re-released to the Material Plane. So the Far Realm tie is very much there in the view of modern inhabitants of the world, most of whom are unaware that aboleths were ever natives.So... yes, I use aboleths a bit. <img src="https://cdn.jsdelivr.net/joypixels/assets/8.0/png/unicode/64/1f600.png" class="smilie smilie--emoji" loading="lazy" width="64" height="64" alt=":D" title="Big grin    :D"  data-smilie="8"data-shortname=":D" /></blockquote>

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