#aboleth

Horus ABOLETH

+ closeups under the cut

My WDDH finished on June 25th, 2025. My players found the treasure, found the aboleth and saved the city.

This was the final showdown. The aboleth was trapped inside a long lost temple of the gold dragon, deep beneath the waters of Waterdeep Port. The Wish spell trapped Golorr, and he was made to fight for the treasure even with the Gold Gradon Aronax himself when he returned to check the temple. Golorr was trying to lure anyone inside to break the spell, and he succeeded with our players…

But they resisted and won.

"Beyond the Veiled Past Header" © Paizo Publishing

[Sponsored by Cranky over on the Patreon, based on the Ruins of Azlant Adventure Path for Pathfinder 1e. In the module Beyond the Veiled Past, the PCs have to contend with an amphibious invasion of ulat-kini soldiers (that's what the skum call themselves), masterminded by aboleth. These troop transports are very imaginative, but the text of the book handwaves them as warships that can go underwater. The sponsor wanted me to give them an actual stat block, and I took my previous sarmak fighting machine mechanics as a starting point. The stats are built around those of a chuul, but trying to average the stats of a chuul and a warship led to some mechanical weirdness. The end result has a lot of hit points for the CR, but since it doesn't function without a crew and is pretty limited in what it can accomplish, I think it's fair. Oh, and the name "malaca" is derived from Malacostraca, the group of crustaceans including shrimp, crabs, lobsters, isopods, and amphipods.

If you'd like to sponsor your own monsters, see bonus writing and/or just support what I do, check out the Creature Codex Patreon here]

Malaca Warship CR 12 N Aberration This gunmetal gray hulk looks like a crustacean the size of a building. It has six legs and a sharp prow, above which grow two probing antennae. Its underside opens up with two sweeping arms, revealing a vast internal chamber.

The fleshwarping techniques of the aboleth are responsible for many horrors—skum, faceless stalkers, mimics. In addition to the monsters they have created, they have also grown living tools that bridge the gap between object and creature. Malaca warships are one of these, a full submersible vehicle made of biological tissue, its nervous system harnessed to pulleys and levers. A malaca warship begins its life as a fertilized chuul egg, but the embryo inside is lobotomized and its growth thrown into overdrive, expanding into a hollow body the size of a sailing vessel. The creature can breathe both air and water, and it gains all the nutrients it needs from food scraps and the bodily waste of its crew, deposited courteously into orifices leading to its digestive system. A malaca warship can emerge onto dry land for troop landings, cargo loading and shock attacks. They must be berthed in water, however, and come into periodic contact with aboleth mucus, else their exoskeletons begin to crack and warp.

No two malaca warships may be identical, as their aboleth architects may choose to grow different partitions in their lower berth to form rooms, and their upper decks may be outfitted with different types of siege weapons. The lower deck is created from the chuul’s body cavity—its forelimbs are modified from pinchers into interlocking slabs capable of opening like a hatch, leading into what could have been a mouth if the malaca’s development wasn’t steered away from typical biology. Some warships feature an interior pool from which an aboleth can reach the controls and steer the thing itself, but most are intended to be operated by a crew of ulat-kini (to allow the skum their endonym). Most feature a large interior chamber useful as a slave pen, as malaca warships are often used in raids on coastal communities for the aboleth to gather new victims for conscription, mind control or even transformation into new monsters.