For the uninitiated, this is an aboleth.
The narrative of the campaign has pretty much spelled out that we're probably going to fight one of these at some point, and there's a high possibility that we're going to find one in our next session.
My party consists of an investigator, an unchained rogue, a magus, and a brawler. Our main issue fighting this thing is that it can almost auto dominate any one of us with its dc 22 will save, and our brawler has a will of +1... so he's auto-dominated.
What we know is that it has a range of 65 ft for that dominate ability, and that it lasts 16 days, so there's pretty much no getting around the fact that he can dominate someone... if we get in range.
Now, the reason it's very terrifying that our brawler can be auto-dominated is that he has a CMB of +20 for grappling. Which means we're losing both the brawler and whomever the poor sap is that the aboleth decides should get hugged.
However, our greatest weakness in this fight is also our greatest strength. Our brawler can completely shut down his spellcasting if he manages to get him in a grapple, since spell-like abilities must sill make concentration checks if grappled. The DC of this concentration check would be 19 + our brawler's CMD... which is a staggering 30. (if you couldn't tell, our brawler is a combat maneuver specialist.) This means that with a concentration dc of 49, the aboleth would be completely incapable of breaking out of the grapple or casting his spell-like abilities, and we'd win the fight.
So thus comes the question. How do we prevent the brawler from being mind-controlled long enough for him to reach the aboleth and completely put him at our mercy? His speed is 30 ft, and we've looked into ways of increasing it but I can't find any.
Have the magus cast protection from evil on the brawler, it makes you immune to possession.
We thought about that. however, protection from evil is not on the magus's spell list. I also don't have a reliable enough UMD skill to hit a 21.
Did some brainstorming... Floating disc. My magus is actually a spelldancer, so she can gain +20 to movement speed for a total of +50. Is it legal to carry the brawler on the disk during my turn for 50 feet then allow him to make his movement of 30 feet and then grapple him?
Protection From Evil potions are 50 gp a pop, by the by.
I assume you can get scrolls and potions since you mentioned UMD earlier. Snag two or three or five of those for everyone and go to town.
I would tell your Brawler to be wary grappling an Aboleth, really all it does is give him a free Full Attack against your Brawler even if it does shut down his Dominate. 4 tentacles at +10, each dealing damage and triggering a save or have your Con reduced by 4 effect is annoying in combat...but potentially deadly afterwards, since you have nobody who can cast the requisite Remove Disease to stop him from taking 1d12 damage every 10 minutes, no save.
This could potentially kill him by the time you get back to a town capable of curing it. I imagine he only has a Fort save of +6-7 (4 class, +2-3 Con, since the +1 Will makes me believe he doesn't have a Cloak of Resistance), so he needs a 13 or 14 to save. Bad odds if he has to save 4 times.
Well the thing there is that the damage is only taken while the brawler's skin isn't kept moist. The setting we're going to be investing is a sewers, which is the most likely place to find an aboleth that has been dominating the minds of people in our city. So keeping the skin moist won't be a problem, and getting back to town quickly enough also won't be a problem since we're in the sewers.
4 tentacles would all have to deal their max of 11 damage for him to be knocked unconcious in one round, and after that one round after the monster is grappled, the aboleth can be pinned by the brawler. In fact I think he has methods of being able to pin in the same round as he grapples. The basic idea of it is that, at the moment, we need to allow the brawler to do his thing without letting the aboleth make the brawler do his thing to us. So I think that the potion of protection from evil works perfectly, I didn't see that at first.
Never fail to account for the dice screwing you. The Con penalty does 10 damage on its own, and crits are a possibility. Likewise, Murphy's Law dictates your Brawler will probably roll a 1 to Pin. =)
Not much you can do about that except have a buncha backup plans though.
I will point out that Aboleths are tricksy sumb~$##es. Dominate isn't their only SLA. They can use both Veil and Project Image. If your Brawler tries to grapple the Image but the real Aboleth is hiding inside an illusion, you could be boned, because that's when the Dominate hammer comes down.
Keep in mind that the casting time for dominate spells is 1 round. That means you'll get an opportunity to act after you know it's up to something but before the spell goes off. You can either get out of range at that point or disrupt its concentration. You could also cast protection from evil, but then the aboleth can just target somebody else.
I used an aboleth on my players when they were lvl 5 too!
The aboleth's lair had several illusions in place; as well as one of the head Cleric they were looking for, and a small army of water elementals. They felt very luck that 'hydraulic water attacks' kept missing them, since the surrounding water was mildy wild magicky. (Aboleth immune due to residing in it for so long). The connecting bridges to other areas of the ruins were also illusions, so falling in by accident was a legit risk they had to discover.
Our team was an Alchemist Vivisectionist, a Bloodrager, a Mystic Theurge hopeful (Wiz/Cle), a Rogue (Not yet unchained), and a Ninja.
The Blood rager and alchemist were dominated, even after I pulled punches with tentacle attacks from below for a couple rounds. They were the strongest. THe only reason they survived a TPK was there was a campaign hook to bargain with an evil outsider in exchange for a favor; the Rogue used his boon, to recall to before appearing before the aboleth, in full power along with his friends.
They rested, prepped tons of Protection from Evil, and returned while super buffed, and curb-stomped the aboleth. My advice becomes from all this; identify your target's lair first if possible, while having readily available countermeasures like Protection from Evil, Invisibility to avoid it's sight, and detect magic to begin discerning what is real and what is not.
Without prior preparation, the best solution is to incapacitate or separate your brawler from combat via hold person, wall spells, etc.
My party has been dealing with lots of illusions (because of the aforementioned aboleth messing with things), so we've got tools to deal with it. My character, for example, constantly is casting detect magic to deal with them. There's also a neat artifact the DM created for us that I suspect we're going to discover helps us a lot with it.
My party has been dealing with lots of illusions (because of the aforementioned aboleth messing with things), so we've got tools to deal with it. My character, for example, constantly is casting detect magic to deal with them. There's also a neat artifact the DM created for us that I suspect we're going to discover helps us a lot with it.
...Detect Magic doesn't defeat illusions.
Unless your GM is deliberately gimping them, which honestly seems like a pretty cool way to reduce the CR of this encounter without actually tweaking the numbers. So, cool.
Really? I could've sworn... It says on the detect magic that it can detect active spells. Aren't illusions active spells? I don't see any indication why detect magic wouldn't tell you there's illusion magic at work where the illusions are.
Generally speaking (at least how I'd run it) Detect Magic would only get you to the point where you have studied it enough to disbelieve.
It's the whole "Detect Magic beats Invisibility" nonsense that most don't hold with.
Even if it did...you need 3 rounds of concentration to know it's Illusion.
If I were inclined to allow a cantrip to automatically defeat any Illusion, I'd probably use that against you.
Of course it wouldn't be viable to defeat them in combat, but if the character has been encountering a lot of illusions I would think that out of combat it would make sense for them to start using detect magic if they suddenly think that maybe what they're seeing is an illusion.
Update: we won. Of course my character is emotionally scarred because illusions caused her to kill some innocent people, but the aboleth is dead.
don't fret too much. those innocent people were illusions as well.
First, as we went into the sewers, there was a complicated set of illusion magic. Our characters failed just the right amount of will saves that we didn't see through all of it. What we thought were some peons ended up being a group of innocents that had previously been captured, and one that we happened to knock out was the only survivor, and whose wife my character had just impaled upon her rapier.
So this made my character a little angry. Her reaction upon the next hint that the aboleth might be somewhere in the sewers prompted her to charge at it after some small discussion of plans were going nowhere. She drank a protection potion and charged straight for it. Long story short, the first thing we thought would actually be the aboleth ended up being an illusory decoy, and my charge surprise round turned into his surprise round.
Basically, because we had prepared with potions, the aboleth couldn't use domination magic, and was left with its tentacles... which brought my character down to 15 HP, and lower if I didn't spend so many arcane points parrying its attacks. Luckily, my character was able to escape death while our brawler was finally able to get in close enough to put the thing in a pinned condition, and at that point it was just fighting its HP bar while my character had to put herself prone to get in that murky water to breathe it in.
A great fight. If my character wasn't fresh and able to use opportune parry and riposte, she might have died, but we prevailed in the end.
Sounds as a great encounter
Holy shit. OP is one of my players.
Holy s+&@. OP is one of my players.
Sounds like you are quite the brutal GM. Aboleth are way under CR'd.
Nicely done. :D
Holy s+&@. OP is one of my players.Sounds like you are quite the brutal GM. Aboleth are way under CR'd.
Nicely done. :D
It's a lot easier if the aboleth has used up most of its Dominate Monster sla (becaue it has a life outside the meddling PCs). OP got lucky, it kept rolling <5 on 3/4ths of its attack rolls.
Thanks :D
I liked the heavy use of illusions. Gives a lot of flavor to the aboleth.
Good enounter, kudos
... I didn't know you used these forums!
But yeah, I enjoyed the flavor of it, even though you're evil for making us kill those people.
No, I don't care that you basically said "are you sure?"! *grumble*