It looks to me like a combination of Algol (a star in real life with a lot of bad superstitions attached to it) and Cthulhu. Is this right?
James Jacobs wanting to more noticeably separate the brand from DnD/Wizards?
Creative Director
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We've done a lot of work expanding the WotC aboleth into an entire species of monsters, and we needed a name for all of them. We also needed a word that we could use to refer to them as a group in non-ogl content, like miniatures or novels or the like.
In creating the word "alghollthu" I did three things:
1) I drew upon decades of experience in making up nonsense words for games, particularly those that drew upon the guttural and alien traditions of Lovecraftian monster names.
2) I kept the first letter as an "A" so that no matter what the word ended up being, it would end up alphabetizing near the start of a book, and would have touchstones and similarities to the word "aboleth" so that it felt "right."
3) I used a misspelling of "although" as the starting point. This is a word that I had a bad habit of typing as "althoguh" in my writing years ago, mostly because my fingers always stumbled over the order of letters as I was typing along at a breakneck pace. Wes Schneider took to circling it each time he found the typo in my writing and drew a line to the margin where he illustrated a new version of the tentacular potential Outer God "Althoguh" and kept warning me to stop typing its name because it wouldn't be long before it heard and came to ruin the world.
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*Sniff* the Aboleth has come so far since it was a unique monster in i1 later reprinted in the Fiend Folio.
*Sniff* the Aboleth has come so far since it was a unique monster in i1 later reprinted in the Fiend Folio.
That takes me back.