Taking 20 Podcast - Ep 261 - Monster Series - Aberrations

Episode Date: September 21, 2025

Diving into the terrifying world of aberrations, this episode explores why these alien beings pose a unique challenge for GMs. Discover their bizarre physiologies, incomprehensible motives, and innate magical abilities drawn from their alien minds, and learn how to weave truly unsettling encounters into your campaigns   #pf2e #Pathfinder #gmtips #dmtips #dnd #rpg #aberrations Resources: Buy Me a Coffee! - ko-fi.com/taking20podcast Nerdarchy’s Guide to Aberrations - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9n98sk2AC2Y  www.taking20podcast.com  Instagram - https://www.instagram.com/taking20podcast  Facebook - https://www.facebook.com/taking20podcast  Bluesky - https://bsky.app/profile/taking20podcast.bsky.social 

This week on the Taking 20 podcast. Aborations are weird, different, maybe even unknowable in a lot of ways. Their logic, for example, completely different from humanoids. They don't think like humanoids. They're probably not driven by petty things like greed or desire for togetherness. They don't believe in honor. They have a completely foreign way of thinking. Thank you for listening to the Taking 20 podcast, episode 261, rekindling the monster series,

this time talking about the broad scope of monsters called aberrations. I want to thank this week's sponsor, Shirts. I was served some Earl Grey, but I couldn't drink it until I changed clothes. After all, I wasn't wearing my t-shirt. If you like this podcast, please hit that like, rate, and subscribe buttons. Wherever you happen to find us, I would love comments, I would love comments, I would love criticisms, I would love any feedback that you would have about this podcast, so please keep them coming. I wanted to get some feedback from you all, and I think words gotten out that I

occasionally review products on this podcast. The reason I say that is I've gotten quite a few emails this week asking me to review this game system product or that one. I want to give you guys what you want, and I don't want to review products if it's not something you'd be interested in. So I'd like your feedback on whether I should continue to do so. Please send me an email, Feedback at Taking20 Podcast.com, and let me know if you want me to keep reviewing role-playing game products on this podcast. I'll also put a poll on the social media, so I'd love to get your feedback there as well. Also, if you have any topics that you'd like me to cover, please send me a message or comment or any other way to send me your ideas.

Ellen sent me a YouTube suggestion a few weeks ago about aberrations, and so I was happy to put together an episode. Thank you again so much, Ellen, for doing so, and if there's any other ideas that you have, send them my way. Today, we are going to be diving into the horrible and terrifying world of aberrations. These creatures are kind of a unique challenge for GMs, because they are, okay, aberrations. are aberrant to this just in, but they operate much differently than we do. They have strange

abilities and left of their own devices, they would twist the entire world in accordance with their own obscure, weird, unfathomable ways. Let's start by level setting a little bit. What's an aberration? Per the 5E Monster Manual, an aberration is a creature that represents beings that are, quote, utterly alien. Many of them have innate magical abilities, drawn from the creature's alien mind rather than the mystical forces of the world. Pathfinder 2E is a bit more succinct in their description, even if it makes the definition a little bit more nebulous. Aborations are creatures from beyond the plains or corruptions of the natural order.

Some examples of creatures that are aberrations would be Abeleths or Al-Golfo in Pathfinder, beholders, mind fliers, the forearmed gugs, flesh warps, and large bipedal frog-like creatures called Slotty, just to name a few. Aborations are different than other types of creatures. You know, you've got dragons. Dragons, like aberrations, can be highly intelligent, but dragons are like super hoarders who believe they're superior to anything and everything around them,

and that's not necessarily true for aberrations. Animals are much simpler creatures, and to quote one of my favorite authors, Terry Pratchett, for most animals, the entire universe has been neatly divided into, things to mate with, eat, run away from, and rocks. So animals are much, much simpler. Construct have no soul and no mind. They're created for a singular purpose and generally are purely functional in nature. Undead, God, there are layers to undead, intelligent versus mindless,

chaotic versus lawful. They are much different creatures. And of course, there are plants that exist to eat or devils that tempt mortals or elementals that embody the features of the elemental plane that they're from. We kind of get those, even if those types of creatures, the undead, the plants, the elementals are different from us. However, aberrations are weird, different, maybe even unknowable in a lot of ways. Their logic, for example, completely different from humanoids. They don't think like humanoids. They're probably not driven by petty things like greed or desire for togetherness. They don't believe in honor. They have a completely foreign way of thinking.

Beholders, for example, may believe that symmetry is the ultimate expression of wealth, beauty, and power. They could become obsessive about it so that their layer may be a perfectly symmetrical three-dimensional space, aligned perfectly down to the last tile, taking years or even decades to complete. Now, I want to take a quick aside and say, when I start talking about aberrations, I will use terms like alien and foreign. I don't mean those in the same way those words would be used here on Earth talking about people that are different. When I say that aberrations have an alien or foreign way of thinking, I just mean it is something that is not typical to what human beings normally do. Anyway, that being said, aberrations do have a different way of thinking, and that different

way of thinking can lead to different motivations and purposes for their even very existence. For example, there may be an aberration or a group of aberrations out there that are trying to reestablish the old order of the world before the gods existed. Maybe they think that their throne was taken from them by the gods and they want it back. Or maybe they want to completely unmake the world, unraveling reality down to the last atom. Or maybe they want to redesign in the world in their own image. And here's what's interesting about aberration. Since their minds work differently, the plans that they undertake to accomplish their motivations and purposes could seem to us chaotic, paranoid, obsessive.

But to them, it's a logical web of contingencies with plans and backup plans and backup plans to those preparing for betrayals or failures at each step along the way. So they think very differently. But similarly, they have completely different physical forms. They may seem strange or even wrong to our eyes. Like if you look at them, they have too many or too few mouths and arms and feet and heads, anything you can think of. There could be an aberration out there where it wears its spleen on top of its head.

Whatever. aberrations are completely foreign to our normal way of thinking and the normal way creatures should be built. They may have teeth where fingers should be or tentacles for legs. Maybe instead of walking like we do, they undulate or glide when they move, giving them this otherworldly feel of just their very existence. There's an aberration that looks like an upright humanoid from a distance and you haul out to it and you give it a greeting, but when when you get close, you realize you've been having a conversation not with the humanoid, but with a mass of worms that writhes together in a vaguely human form hidden under heavy,

priestly like robes. Aborations can be almost the sky's the limit. You can go crazy with some of your designs if the regular aberrational, if the regular aberrations provided by your game system don't quite fit. What's also interesting about these aberrations is that, there are dumb ones, but some of them have this terrible intelligence and a very high end score. Some of them possess an intelligence that is both profound and terrifying, that sets them apart from mere monsters. Unlike creatures like animals that are driven by instinct,

these aberrations can exhibit a chillingly high level of cunning and strategic thought. Their minds operate on a plane completely beyond what humans can comprehend, and they may even influence others with subtle, insidious malice, for lack of a better word. This frightening cognitive ability allows them to orchestrate those complex schemes that I was talking about. These schemes can span years or maybe even centuries, making them not just physical threats, which a lot of them are, they can be terrifying and do tons of damage, but they're also masters of psychological and political warfare. It's a combination of alien intellect and malevolent intent that makes them really particularly dangerous. Because they're capable of exploiting the

deepest fears and vulnerabilities of their adversaries. They're not just cruel. They're cruel with a purpose, and that makes them terrifying. The knowledge that they have, the knowledge they possess may not even be something that humanoids could understand even if we could grasp what they are trying to communicate to us. Many aberrations corrupt everything around them. Aboleth's leap to mind here because they release a foul viscous mucus everywhere they go and this mucus can actually corrupt air-breathing humanoids who come into contact with it. But even if they don't, the very water around an abelous layer can become foul and stagnant, murky, and gross with this slime and goodness knows what else.

But not only do they physically corrupt things, and yes, they can, more on that in a minute, but the corruption could be non-physical as well. Abeleths, again, dominate the minds of creatures around them. But, for example, the gibbering mouther, or the gibbering mouther, or gibbering mouther, I'm not going to get at a big discussion on whether it's gibbering or gibbering. I took a quick informal poll of the players that I play with, and it's split 50-50. So whichever it is, I'm going to say gibbering, and if you pronounce it differently, just please accept my apologies.

The gibbering mouther, which is this chaotic amalgamation of eyes and tongues and mouths and teeth, and it's awful, can leave an area that was just normal soil of a quagmire, twisted vines and thorny briars while chanting with a dozen mouth simultaneously in multiple languages and ways that drive creatures in the area insane. Aberrations overall are meant to be terrifying because they are so aberrant, so different than anything else that is naturally occurring in an area. So aberrations can be so much fun to add to your game, but there are some tips that I want to give you in case you want to include monsters that are classified as aberrations in your game system.

First and foremost, please keep in mind player lines and veils. And I've talked a little bit about lines and veils previously, but they are things that may make players uncomfortable or may even make them leave your table. Aborations in a lot of their forms and a lot of the different types of creatures tend to have examples of or get very close to body horror. Mind flares, for example, They look almost human kind of, but they have octopus like heads, and they consume the brains of their victims, and that can really bother some players. If that didn't bother you enough, by the way, they also reproduce by infecting a host with a tadpole, which causes them to undergo this horrific transformations called seromorphosis. It's slow and agonizing until it suddenly isn't so slow, and the person that they were are utterly consumed, and a moment. mind flair emerges. Gibbering mouthers are, I mentioned, masses of eyes and mouths and tongues

and that just slither along, leaving behind this slime that can corrupt an area. They are created by fusing many humanoids together via some otherworldly, magical, dark, horrific force. Flesh warps and Pathfinder are created by some sort of magical or alchemical process that transforms a creature in various ways. They wind up becoming in an amalgam, a combination of different creatures. Sometimes the victim is willing. They actually go into this, eyes completely open, that this is going to be awful, but they're hoping to become something different on the other side. Sometimes they want to do this, like a flesh warp cleric that I've role played in a recent campaign, but sometimes this process happens against the victim's will. They are trapped and

forced to undergo this alchemical, magical process that forever modifies their body. Yet their body basically becomes this jigsaw of different creatures, and sometimes the end resulted, no matter how well it goes, that creature is in constant pain of all of these creatures that have been just mashed together to make one. These are all body horror that can cause some players to very much be turned off by a game, possibly being repulsed or even nauseated by descriptions of tentacle arms or faces with a beak instead of a nose and a mouth. So before you introduce aberrations and spit a lot of description on the body horror elements of their physical form, make sure your players won't be made uncomfortable by this.

It doesn't. Make sure these things don't go beyond the lines and veils that you have established. Elements of body horror, even minor ones, can trigger real-world anxieties in some players. and we're here to have fun, not make people uncomfortable. Many aberrations have aspects of their existence that land solidly in the realm of psychological horror. So if you want to introduce them to the game, play up the frightening aspects of those monsters a little as long as that's what your players want. If you've ever been exposed to stories about Call of Cthulhu or even better played a game in that type of world, you know what I mean by psychological horror.

It's a cosmic horror about how atypical and unknowable these creatures are. They exude a type of dread, whether you state it or not. I mean, imagine a gibbering mouth or its 150 eyes and 100 mouths all talking and singing and laughing and crying at the same time, saying different things in different ways in different languages. Maybe some of the voices are crying out for help while others are singing a song their humanoid form once remembered. Others still are lamenting lost loves half remembered, while still other groups are warmly inviting the PCs to join this mass of former humanity.

It's no wonder that a lot of aberrations cause mental damage and can cause a character to go insane. Aborations tend to have a strange appearance compared to what we're used to, so play that up at your table. For example, Abeleths have a large number of eyes, too many for their form with four sliming, tentacles around a lamprey-like maw. Or illifid or mind-flayers, how they commune with an elder brain, possibly even every thought shared on a broadcast thought network with the other ilithids. See, to me, that is terrifying because imagine never having a moment of silence in your head, but a hundred different voices and one powerful one driving your actions, telling you what they're seeing, giving you feedback, slowly executing a plan that we human beings

can't even understand. Speaking of which, a lot of aberrations have motives that don't align with typical villains. Sure, there are aberrations who seek out the familiar drives of wealth or power, but some aberration motivations could be fundamentally alien, driven by an incomprehensible logic that defies human understanding. The aberration may want to use powerful magic to steal all the voices from a certain dwarf clan. It doesn't only keep it as trophies, but it wants to weave them into an audio tapestry that can sing a song of cosmic entropy. It could be driven by the need to dismantle the concepts of up, down, north, or anything, not just to cause chaos, but to realign reality with a geometry that only it understands.

The horror lies not just in its destructive actions, but in the realization that these foreign goals are so utterly unreliable. leaded to our desires or fears, that they're more of an existential threat with no common ground, no possibility for negotiation or empathy, only a terrifying, unstoppable purpose of its own design. A lot of aberrations have unpredictable and strange cosmic abilities that manifest around them and even within those who encroach on their domain. Humanoids who start getting close to their lair may start hearing voices, getting brief messages being telepathy, seeing illusions or scenes of loved ones back home. They use your own memories to perfectly mimic sounds and voices that are familiar to you.

Besides being driven stark raving insane, something that's always terrified me, and this isn't Jeremy as a DM, by the way, this is just Jeremy as a human being. Something that's terrified me is the concept of having your memories stolen from you. Oblexes in 5E are an ooze that feed off the memories of, of your mind. And to quote Mordenkinen, they don't want the memories to serve any end of their own making. They are just hungry from memories and personalities because they are empty without them. Similarly, in Pathfinder, there are creatures called V-Dus that can rewrite your memories. The thought of something that can feed off your memories, leaving you confused and maybe even

untethered to what you are or have been, or a creature that can rewrite your memories leaving you confused is just awful and terrifying to me. Who you are now is a product of what you remember about everything you've experienced leading up to that moment. If you can change the memories of a being, you can change who they are, how they act, and maybe what's important to them. And if that's not bad enough, by the way,

some aberrations can modify the very physical nature of your body. Abeleths can infect you with this slime and make it so that you can no longer breathe air, you can only breathe water. So even if you break free from their overwhelming mental power to start controlling your actions again, you hit that natural 20 on the saving throw and yay, I'm free! Nope, you can't go home.

You can't leave the water, which is where the abeliff lives. You're changed for a time, one to four hours in 5E and longer in Pathfinder. So many aberrations, the point is they are corrupting. They corrupt everything around them, trying to make it more like them. So make sure you include that when you're describing areas around their layers. Everything about the environment can change or warp with the corruption these creatures exude.

Maybe there are strange plant growths that are unnatural to the area, or the animals that do exist in that area are stunted, mutated, warped in some way. That very air or water around the layer gets heavier or stickier, the closer you get to the creature's home. There could even be areas where the PC's senses are overwhelmed, like an area of complete and utter silence, or the opposite where the PC's bombarded by sound. Similarly, certain areas near an aberration's layer

could be so dark that the PC thinks they may have gone blind, or flooded with a barrage of colors that assaults the brain it has so much variety to it. Same with smells or touch. I mean, imagine, okay, if you've ever walked among equipment that's high voltage, You'll notice this tingling or maybe even buzzing or stinging sensation on the skin. An aberration's layer could have that kind of effect on those who are there against the creature's wishes as they start to get angry. In summary, aberrations present a unique and terrifying challenge for game masters and players due to their alien minds, bizarre physiologies, and incomprehensible motives.

Unlike conventional monsters, these creatures operate on a logic foreign to the normal humanoid, races, making them masters of psychological and physical corruption. By understanding their unique characteristics from body horror elements to their capacity for manipulating memories and environments, you can effectively weave truly unsettling and unforgettable encounters into your campaign, ensuring that players confront not just a monster, but an existential threat that defies understanding. And if you do, Cthulhu Thuggan, for in his eyes, house and Leia, dead Cthulhu waits dreaming.

Come, dissolve yourself into the black iridescence of its power. Let loose the shackles of your sanity. Embrace the strange eons where even death may die. Sorry about that. I may need to take a break from reading Lovecraft for a little while. Thank you so much for listening. Please subscribe to the podcast and follow us on social media. I'll include links down in the episode description.

And Ellen, once again, thank you so much for the topic idea. I hope you enjoyed the episode. In two weeks, I'm going to have a player-focused episode, giving you some tips and tricks to improve teamwork within the party. But before I go, I want to thank this week's sponsor, Shirts. I wanted to alter a shirt to make it fit better, but I don't think I have the skill to do it. I guess it's best to just sleeve it alone.

This has been episode 261, all about aberrations. My name is Jeremy Shelley, and I hope that your next game is your best game. The Taking 20 podcast is Copyright 2025 by Jeremy Shelley. The opinions or views expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of the host. References to game system content are copyright their respective publishers.