What do you find in a city of aberrations?

[Zog]

Imagine a building constructed solely of flies... hundreds of thousands of buzzing, swarming flies. They don't bite unless you try to walk through a wall, but they all stay in the places where walls and floors would be. They feed on the corpses of all the millions of flies that have already died, and live out their lives worshipping a fly-thing that lives in the tower's basement.

Wow. Thats just. Wow.
You, Sir, have a truely disturbing vision.

 

[The_Warlock]

Hmm, Cliffside Gorge city dominated by abberations?

GRELL.

You need Grell. First you have your floating Brain with beak and paralytic tentacles, that are competent sorcerers (of the higher castes), and create items of technomagic relying a on strange energies and forces of the natural world.

Now, add templates...

The Fused Aberration from Chaositech...
Any number of things from GR Advenced Bestiary (All templates, all the time)...

But make an aberrations aberation...

Pick another aberration you particularly like that has 4 or more leg like limbs...
Tauric (insert beastie) Grell - a multi limbed raking nightmare than can levitate into
dark holes in the ceiling to drop its paralytic tentacles on you while unleashing the power of it's lightning lances.

Grell PsuedoScience items are also not easily usable by non-grell, but they could find weird glyph carvings in some of the grell dominated sections that would allow the alienists to learn some of the basic grell science feats so they could make or use the lightning lances and similar thngs. I highly recommend Lords of Darkness from WotC for this.

Also in Lords of Darkness is the beholder epicurean who paralyzes and knocks enemies into a chasm filled with violet fungi to "season" his food.

And since the aberrations are underground, how about a fungal hobgoblin farm...essentially the Daelkyr has set aside a few old sparring or feasting rooms, and lesser beings defecate and drop all their refuse there, where they have mutated some of the originally enslaved bugbears into rooted fungal bugbears and hobgoblins...as large as their humanoid selves, they are now part giant fungus, rooted the floor, with limited limb movement, blind, but with blindsense, and fully functional mouths and vocal cords. They are intelligent, but completely helpless, and insane and because they are both fleshy meat, and fungal matter, with living brain tissue, and they constantly moan, and shriek and sob, they are both a soothing musical accompaniment to the area (for aberrations) and can provide for a wide variety of aberration dietary requirements.

Sounds like it'll be a fun adventure

 

[kanithardm]

I think its a trick question. Kind of like, "What color is the red house?"

 

[Shade]

(See Lords of Madness... actually that whole book is perfect for what you want. )

Yes! The fact that you are even considering this sort of thing gives me confidence that you will be more than satisfied with that purchase.

 

[shilsen]

Imagine a building constructed solely of flies... hundreds of thousands of buzzing, swarming flies. They don't bite unless you try to walk through a wall, but they all stay in the places where walls and floors would be. They feed on the corpses of all the millions of flies that have already died, and live out their lives worshipping a fly-thing that lives in the tower's basement.

Very nice.

And since the PCs would, very likely, kill whatever lives there and/or take something from there, I'm imagining the look on their faces when they wake up at camp and find a small swarm of flies buzzing around them. And slowly getting bigger.

 

[diaglo]

don't forget structure of doors, windows, and other entrances may be keyed differently. they don't have to open by hand or foot or means a humanoid would open them.

a thought activating a psi crystal, a different shaped appendage like a tentacle for the grell or mind flayer, 8 eyestalks inserted into an overhead shape.

mix up the servant and master theme.

servants quarters or entrances are mundane and can be opened easily by the PCs or other humanoids.

but masters quarters require something that is keyed to them. either shape, resistance, psionics or magic activation.

 

[DMH]

A heart like structure (the size of a house) that is slowly pumping green-grey goo into the surrounding landscape, slowly changing that into a slick stone with veins. Sort of like Starcraft creep, but not a requirement for aberration buildings.

Living sound chanting- what form might it take?

A statue of a local ruler- with tentacles and a sucker mouth.

Edit: This thread might give you some ideas: http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=128562&page=1&pp=40

 

[shilsen]

Edit: This thread might give you some ideas: http://www.enworld.org/showthread.php?t=128562&page=1&pp=40

Oh man, that's funny! Now I wonder who in the party is the most maternal? Maybe I should go for the warforged. Delivery's always more fun when you don't even have any available orifices

 

[DMH]

I was looking at Advanced Bestiary and BOT (DE) 3.5 for templates for this city and both have some interesting concepts. Personally the aberrant, wretched, hiveling, legion, amorphous, siphon, mindbender and spirit from BOT and the amalgam, creature swarm, flesh plant, fungal, plague bearer, saurian, ooze and verminoid from AB are the best.

I added spirit and fungal because even though the aberrations are going to be dominate, there will be other things moving in that like the atmosphere.

 

[ajanders]

Tesseracts...someone wrote a very erudite description of a tesseract dungeon on these boards which I promptly failed to comprehend.

Tirapheg: the freaky Siamese triplets of D&D. Make your own mini out of Sculpley: if it comes out looking freaky, misshapen, and disturbing, that's just right.

Sentient warpings of space. I have no idea how to stat them, but they should be pretty wierd.