And so we come to the final letter in the English alphabet. There are a few obvious choices, like Zombie, but that particular one has been done to death in books and on film, and I have little interest in it. So, since the end is the beginning and all that, for Z we are going back to A, to pick up a monster I missed that is an awesome faction.
Aboleth.
I am pretty sure these monsters are the IP of Hasbro, like the Mind Flayers are. But they are such a cool, Lovecraftian menace of epic proportions, I have to include them in any megadungeon. If you don’t know what they are, google them, then come back. I’ll wait.
They are a menace from beyond space and time. They first showed up in a throw-away appearance in the old TSR module, Dwellers in the Forbidden City, then showed up a year or two later in the Monster Manual II. They were the central menace in the epic adventure Night Below in 1996 or so. Like most cool monsters (as I pointed out for the Eye Tyrants), there were many layers of information added on over the decades. You can pick and choose whatever you want from all that; I’m sticking closely with the original, more sketchy material, which allows me to mold them closer to my liking, and for developments and details to come out in emergent play.
So we have a huge, psychic, tentacled, fish-monster that plots against humanity. Like many of the early monsters, they were given little motivation for existing, beyond hanging out in their lair and waiting for adventurers to try and take their treasure. The entry in the MM2 has a single concluding paragraph with sparse info on possible cities, and that is pretty much it. That’s good: if you are making your own megadungeon-centered campaign, you can make up the details for your villains on your own, as it fits into the larger picture.
So for the megadungeon we are going to make based on this series of posts, the aboleth will be central villains. They are an extra-dimensional menace, one of the Things Man Was Not Meant To Know. They have little use for terrestrial riches, except maybe gems. Maybe the creatures find them oddly attractive? Or maybe they feed on them: maybe not as a staple in the diet, but as dessert. They have little interest or patience in the plots of others, save as it affects their own goals.
OK…so what are those goals? This is where we can go big. They hate life. They don’t want to rule over it, they want to destroy it. All of it. In every dimension. And then…? They will float around in the void circling their mad god (Azathoth?), listening to the soothing psychic pipers, in total Zen bliss…
That is their long-term goal, and they realize it might take a few million more years. So for now, they are content in controlling the minds of a few and manipulating events so they lead to the destruction of others. Whether the destruction of a nation or an adventuring party, it all adds up eventually.
In the megadungeon, they are here for a few reasons. While contemptuous of intrigue, they engage in it as long as it makes other factions weaker. To that end they might actually bargain with the PCs, briefly, using them to destroy others. They might be behind conflicts between other factions in the complex, like the drow and beholders should such a situation arise. But their goal here is the ultimate destruction of all those within it.
Having a good vs. evil theme, with a Sauron-like Dark Lord is usually not a good idea in rpgs, as it will dominate the play and force the players into certain paths. But with the aboleth, you can get the same kind of epic feel in the campaign without limiting your play. These guys are interstellar evil, and while their goal might be improbable, it is still an existential threat, and a directly tangible one as well. They might not be the ultimate villains in the complex, but they are among the most dangerous.
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And that is it. We cheated a bunch of times, but that is the core of the Megadungeon Faction Alphabet posts. There will be at least one more, where we tie it all together, and make a megadungeon driven by factions. Until then!