Aboleth

Most races maintain as part of their culture elaborate creation myths, stories they pass down through the generations with great respect, for these myths tell of how their race came to be. Often, one race’s creation myths are at odds with another’s, but this is of little concern, since a conflicting tale can easily be discounted as sheer fabrication. Not all races have creation myths. The aboleths do not share myth-stories for a simple reason. They believe it an indisputable fact that they were the first, the primal race that existed before nearly all else. They know this because they remember the ancient past with crystal clarity. All else in the world is a pale imitation of their primal perfection. Even the deities themselves are subject to derision, for the aboleths know that they predate the gods. They have seen the world destroyed countless times by apocalypses both natural and artificial, yet each time the world remade itself and the aboleths survived. They are truly nightmares out of time.

Basic Information

Anatomy

Superficially, an aboleth resembles a fish. Yet it takes only a few moments of observation to realize that an aboleth is something else entirely—not fish, nor squid, nor boneless deep-sea predator, but something that combines elements of all three.

EXTERNAL ANATOMY

An average aboleth measures 20 feet long and weighs 6,500 pounds, although many live to grow much larger. The largest aboleth encountered by reputable adventurers measured just over 40 feet long, but certainly even larger specimens lurk in the deepest reaches of the unseen realm. Their streamlined shape efficiently slithers through the primeval seas of the ancient past as well as through the contemporary underground seas that fill the lower reaches of the world. Perhaps the most distinctive of an aboleth’s features are its four tentacles. Used primarily to capture, subdue, and transform prey and slaves, they serve the creature as a means of locomotion when out of the water. The powerful tentacles grab nearby surfaces and literally drag the creature’s writhing bulk along behind. Each tentacle is little more than a powerful coil of muscles wrapped in a sheath of mucus membrane. Down the length of each tentacle runs a single primary slime duct (labelled 1 on the diagram on the next page) as well as countless capillary ducts that transport the specialized slime created in its milathast (an organ described below) to the tentacle surface. The creature uses this toxic slime to transform captured victims into creatures more able to serve in its watery lair.
An aboleth swims using powerful strokes of its tail while holding its tentacles up against the side of its body. The creature possesses numerous fins to stabilize and guide its motion. A swimming aboleth looks more like a snake than a fish, so sinuous and fluid is the motion of its tail and body.
The creature’s mouth is a unique organ. When closed, little is visible beyond a pale white pucker, no more than a few inches across. It opens with shocking speed when the creature feeds. Fully opened, the mouth resembles an equilateral triangle about 2 feet wide on a side. At each corner, a long, thin stalk tipped with a bony spike (2) extends outward. The inner walls of an aboleth’s mouth are studded with thousands of tiny serrated teeth. The three bony stalks are used to collect food and push it into the mouth, which then constricts and shreds the food into easily swallowed ribbons. Despite its fantastic amount of teeth, an aboleth has no natural bite attack; its feeding mandibles and teeth are too small and weak to be used in combat.
Along the creature’s flanks run twin sets of large orifices (3), each of which can open as wide as 2 feet. Most aboleths have two orifices on each flank, but a particularly well-endowed specimen can have up to seven on a side. On a more natural creature, they might be called nostrils. An aboleth uses these vents to breathe, scent, speak, and expel mucus into the surrounding area. On land, this mucus provides a slimy bed of ooze that allows the creature to slither about more easily. In water, the mucus transforms the liquid around the creature into a cloud of soupy slime. In either environment, an aboleth breathes the mucus in order to survive; an aboleth that somehow loses the ability to create the slime quickly suffocates, even underwater.

SKIN

An aboleth’s hide is actually a thick layer of multiple membranes too solid to be called mucus and too runny to be called skin. The membrane layer acts like soggy rubber when manipulated, capable of stretching out to great lengths but returning to its original shape when released. The material is far tougher than skin and is quite difficult to cut or pierce, affording excellent natural armor when buttressed by the creature’s skeleton. To casual observation, the membranous “skin” seems to be a dark, nauseating green, but on closer inspection, a rainbow of faint colors can be seen dancing across and under its surface. These flashes of prismatic light are no mere figments; they are the latent energies the creature uses to manifest its amazing psionic powers.
When the layer of membranes dries, it becomes rough, leathery, and completely waterproof. This seals essential moisture inside the aboleth but the drying process is excruciatingly painful and debilitating to the creature. An aboleth’s membranes dry quite rapidly once the creature is out of water. Any damage thus received can be cured by immersion in water, which rehydrates the membranes. An aboleth whose membranes remain dry does not die. It merely enters a state of suspended animation similar to sleep, except that the creature remains aware of its surroundings. It can hear and see, but cannot detect odors or feel tactile sensations. It retains the ability to think and observe, but it can take no actions, not even purely mental actions. Inside, it remains moist and functional; an aboleth in this state that is badly cut or pierced leaks and quickly bleeds to death. Left undisturbed, though, it can remain in this state forever. This is known to aboleths as the “long dreaming” and is considered a fate far worse than death

TRANSFORMATIVE MUCUS

The mucus which the aboleth secretes has a profound effect on other creatures. It is able to warp and twist the physical structure of creatures who come into contact with the liquid. In a less concentrated dose – such as the cloud which surrounds the aboleth in the water – this will infect any creatures who come into physical contact with the aboleth, rendering their body temporarily unable to process oxygen, and only able to breathe underwater.
However, in a more concentrated dose direct from the aboleths tentacles, the mucus affects the structure of the creature’s skin, causing it to become translucent and slimy. When this creature is outside of a body of water, this affected skin begins to harden and crack, causing great pain and damage.
Both of these transformative effects are incredibly beneficial to the aboleth, allowing them to adapt their slaves to better function in their water lairs.

INTERNAL ANATOMY

Unlike other aberrations, an aboleth’s internal organs are fairly analogous to those found in more natural creatures—in their case, fish. Despite these similarities, certain aspects of the aboleth’s innards defy logic and explanation.

SKELETAL SYSTEM

The creature’s skeletal system is perhaps the simplest of its internal organs. Fully a third of the creature’s skeleton consists of its massive skull, a huge shape that extends from the front where its three jawbones (which allow for its triangular mouth) come together down to the midpoint of its back. Extending back from the skull is the spinal cord, a wide set of interlocking bones with incredible flexibility; an aboleth can coil up like a snake if it wishes. Descending from either side are numerous long ribs, each independently articulated and connected on the beast’s underside to a large, flat bone that protects its stomach and other internal organs from attacks and damage. The ribs vanish as the tail begins. The tail is supported by a long extension of the spinal cord. The creature’s fins contain no bones and are supported by thick sets of cartilaginous spines.

DIGESTIVE SYSTEM

An aboleth’s digestive system is straightforward as well, consisting of a mouth, an esophagus, a particularly large stomach, and coils of intestines. The creature’s teeth are small but numerous, and they extend all the way down its esophagus (4) to the stomach (5). An aboleth takes several minutes to swallow food, and such morsels are slashed and torn by the tiny teeth the entire way. Food reaches the stomach as a slurry. The stomach breaks the food down further and siphons off a certain portion to a long, flat organ wedged between the stomach and the lower ribcage. This organ is part of the respiratory system and is known as the milathast (6). The actual process of extracting nutrition from food occurs in an aboleth’s intestines (7). The creature can digest flesh, bone, and vegetable matter with equal ease; other materials are either not swallowed in the first place or passed through the intestinal tract with great pain.

RESPIRATORY SYSTEM

While it is commonly believed that aboleths breathe water, they do not. They possess neither lungs nor gills, yet they still must process something to provide their blood and bodies with energy. Whatever it is that aboleths breathe, it is found only in the clear, runny mucus that they constantly produce. This mucus is generated in the creature’s milathast, the closest organ an aboleth has to a lung. The milathast draws in water from the numerous ventral orifices on the creature’s body, mixes it with material siphoned from the creature’s stomach, and squirts the resulting mess back outside the body, where it interacts with the surrounding water to create a thick cloud of mucus that the creature can then breathe. An organ similar to the milathast is located above the creature’s stomach, nestled between its two hearts. This organ, the nilthast (8), converts liquid mucus into a foul-smelling gas. By regulating the amount of mucus and gas in this bladderlike organ, an aboleth can quickly gain or lose buoyancy, and thus more easily navigate vertical changes in direction while swimming. The gases generated here are also used to assist respiration when the monster is not in water.

CIRCULATORY SYSTEM

The most interesting aspect of an aboleth’s circulatory system is that it has two hearts. The primary heart (9) is located just above the intestines in the creature’s lower back. This organ pumps blood throughout the body and maintains blood pressure, just as a normal heart does. This heart is connected to the secondary heart (10) via a large artery and a large vein; the artery passes through the creature’s nilthast, where it meets the respiratory system. The second heart provides blood to the aboleth’s immense brain and seems to vitalize the blood with a mysterious chemical or enzyme that only the brain needs. Aboleth blood comes in two colors; the blood that fuels its body is bright red, while the blood that flows from the secondary heart to the brain is deep purple, almost black, in color.

CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM

The most highly developed of an aboleth’s organs is its central nervous system—in particular, its brain. An aboleth’s brain is a massive structure that accounts for nearly one-fifth of the creature’s body mass. The brain is various shades of purple and looks somewhat similar in shape to an aboleth without its long tail. The brain consists of five major sections, each of which is discussed below.
Frontal Lobe (1): Located at the front of the brain, this cone-shaped lobe is pale purple and covered with thousands of tiny, hornlike protrusions. This lobe has two primary functions. First, it generates an aboleth’s powerful enslaving mental attack. Second, it functions as a telepathic core that enables the creature to converse with its enslaved minions, while preventing the minions from sensing anything in the aboleth’s mind but its unyielding domination and control.
Primary Lobe (2): The primary lobe is located directly behind the frontal lobe and above the ventral lobe. It is here that an aboleth’s primary brain functions occur: thought, logic, intelligence, reason, and everything else that brains make possible in other creatures. The creature’s three optic nerves attach to this portion of the brain.
Ventral Lobe (3): Although the ventral lobe looks like four separate tentacle-shaped lobes radiating out from below the primary lobe, it is in fact a single lobe, connected on the underside of the brain. The four arms of the lobe are striped with alternating bands of dark and light purple, and they store the memories an aboleth has created for itself and the racial memories it gained at birth. These arms continue to grow as an aboleth ages, and in the eldest aboleths, the arms of the ventral lobe can reach all the way back to the base of the tail. Where these arms extend out of the skull, they are surrounded by a tough but flexible sheath of tissue. The lobe itself is nearly as strong as bone while remaining as flexible as the creature’s tentacles.
Dorsal Lobe (4): While the ventral lobe might be the largest portion of an aboleth’s brain, the dorsal lobe is easily the most visually stunning. Located behind the primary lobe, it consists of a writhing mass of purple tendrils with tips that flash and pulse with multicolored light. The light arcs and dances from one tendril to the other, representing the vast stores of psionic and magical energy at an aboleth’s command. This energy is apparently generated by the dorsal lobe and focused by the primary lobe to create the numerous illusions that aboleths are notorious for using.
Rear Lobe (5): This is the smallest lobe, consisting of six long, tendril-shaped extensions connected to a central spherical hub at the farthest section of the dorsal lobe. This portion of the brain takes care of the body’s autonomic functions, such as breathing, circulation, digestion, and the like.

Growth Rate & Stages

Aboleths are born completely cognizant and mature, their minds instantly absorbing and assimilating the knowledge and memories of their parent. They do not go through any period of childhood per se, but they are still physically quite weak and helpless for several years after hatching. As it grows, a young aboleth remains close to its parent for approximately ten years, obeying the parent completely and without question for this period. After reaching maturity at age ten, a fully grown aboleth has finally developed all of its psionic powers and enslave abilities and is ready to head off on its own.
Aboleths continue to grow in size, albeit at a much slower rate, as they age. This growth continues until the creature reaches a Gargantuan size and a length of about 40 feet. Technically, the creature keeps growing after this point, but its physical growth slows to such an extent that it can be measured only on a geologic scale.
Nevertheless, it is distinctly possible that larger aboleths exist, since barring death from disease or violence, aboleths are effectively immortal. Their minds and bodies remain as completely formed at age ten as they are at age ten thousand and beyond. Aboleths, as a rule, are not religious. They distinctly remember life before the arrival of the deities and feel no need to prostrate themselves before creatures that are relatively new to the world, no matter how admittedly powerful such creatures might be. As a result, aboleths have no real concept of anything like an afterlife, and thus have no rituals for the dead. Aboleths believe that any of their fellows that die committed some kind of error that led to their demise. At best, they are considered sustenance to feed upon, and at worst, a rotting testimony to failure, barely worthy of the energy it takes to dispose of the carcass. A dead aboleth is left for the creature’s minions to handle; aboleths have no graveyards, for to build a graveyard is to admit mortality.

Dietary Needs and Habits

Although aboleths can subsist by filtering microscopic organisms out of the surrounding water, they view this practice as something done in desperation only. Aboleths are carnivorous and enjoy feeding on a wide variety of flesh. They are fond of fish, squid, octopus, whale, and jellyfish, but their favorite foods are those found only on land. The flesh of humanoids - especially that of humans and gnomes is considered a delicacy. Aboleths find the flesh of creatures transformed by their tentacle slime to be the most delectable and easy to digest, so they take pains to make sure food is properly “seasoned” before feeding. Despite its great size, an aboleth need not eat much to subsist. Its stomach and intestines are so fantastically efficient that a typical humanoid creature can nourish an aboleth for a month.
Aboleths might brand their slaves by eating nonessential portions of them, or simply select their least efficient slave when it’s time for a meal.
As an unusual aspect of an aboleth’s dietary process, it gains flashes of memory and emotion from the body of the creature being eaten. These flashes come at random times and are little more than partial memories or powerful emotions. An aboleth regards them as the height of the culinary experience.

Additional Information

Perception and Sensory Capabilities

An aboleth’s senses are roughly equal to that of a human’s, with the exception of its eyesight. An aboleth’s three eyes see as well as a human’s in bright light, but in complete darkness they give the creature darkvision out to 60 feet. All three eyes appear as little more than large, red ovals; no iris or pupil is visible. An aboleth detects scents via its ventral orifices, as mentioned above, and detects sound by feeling the vibrations in the air or water upon its skin; in effect, the creature’s skin acts as a huge eardrum. Aboleths lack tongues, but the walls of their mouths have a highly developed sense of taste nonetheless. The most sensitive parts of an aboleth’s body are its tentacles and the tip of its tail (where its reproductive organs are located).

Civilization and Culture

History

Aboleths are characterized by their ancient nature. They remember the rise and fall of countless nations, the foundation of the first religions, the formation of mountain ranges, and the creation of the seas themselves. They have had more time to build their empires than any other race; these empires rise and fall on a geologic scale through the eons. They are primal forces, unknowable to anything but their own kind. There can be no accounting of the history of the aboleth race. The creatures have existed for millions of years, and any chronicle of their history with even a small level of detail would require a tome thousands of pages in length. Still, despite its age, the aboleth race follows certain inexorable trends, just as the life and death of mountains and oceans follows a cyclic path.
Since their inception, aboleths have founded countless empires in the watery reaches of the world. Their first empire remains their longest-lived and most expansive. Built when the world itself was a barren rock of boiling seas and choking skies, this empire spanned the globe. With the world already under their control, the aboleths turned their intellects to other pursuits, primarily the creation of minions to perform the dreary, day-to-day tasks of keeping their empire running. They experimented with countless forms of life, including constructs, oozes, elementals, vermin, and eventually more complex creatures like animals, magical beasts, and even humanoids.
The world of the primal empire was a place of eternal night, truly vast oceanic gulfs, and twisted monstrosities fashioned by the aboleths in their own image. For timeless ages, this primal empire prospered—until disaster struck. What precisely destroyed the primal empire is known only to the aboleths, and they do not speak of it, even among themselves. Sages of other races have posited theories. Perhaps their slave races managed to rebel against them. Perhaps some great natural disaster struck. Perhaps the aboleths turned on themselves in a fit of self-destruction. One popular theory holds that the slave races developed something new over those millions of years, something the aboleths had no prior experience with and were thus wholly unprepared to defend against. This theory claims that the slave races developed faith and found that there were creatures above the aboleths—creatures with power even more awe-inspiring. Apparently, these slaves called the deities into being, and the deities smote the aboleths to a shadow of their former glory. This, if true, would go a long way toward explaining the aboleth race’s cultural disdain for divine magic. Whatever the cause of it, the primal empire’s devastation was not quite complete. Ruins of the empire survived here and there—terrible structures founded on vile and unclean geometric principles. While the aboleths themselves were nearly obliterated, at least some survived. It might even be possible that only one survived, for a single aboleth, given time, can spawn legions. In any case, the world was free of their reign for another span of time, perhaps millions of years.
When the aboleths again emerged from wherever they had hidden, it was into a strange new world, one with a profusion of life beyond what they had managed to achieve. They could not know if this life had been visited upon the world by an outside force of divine nature, or if their surviving slaves and living experiments had simply evolved during their absence. The aboleths didn’t care; they simply knew that the world was theirs, and all other beings were vermin to be exterminated.
Thus, the aboleths set about a great crusade to retake the world. Through the millennia, their efforts have been repeated time and time again; they conquer and hold the world for a period before events conspire to wrench it away from their control and force them once again into seclusion. Certainly, the aboleths know how many times this cycle of triumph and defeat has repeated itself, yet this is another subject they never discuss. Learned individuals argue over the current state of the aboleth empire; is it waxing or waning? The growth and decline of this race is spread out over such vast periods of time that it is akin to the observation of events on a geologic scale. A pessimist believes that the aboleths are still building their forces and preparing for an assault on the world, while an optimist sees that they are again in decline.
Whatever the truth, it is unlikely that the aboleth race will see any change in activity over the next few thousand years. However, there is always the possibility of unforeseen events. Just as a massive volcanic eruption can change the face of a world overnight, so can a single event change the strength and power of the aboleth race for better or worse.