Aboleth - Legendary to Relentless #1

Thanks to Crit Hit the Giant for the series name suggestion!

There has been a lot of interest and discussion around converting 5E monsters into Daggerheart. I see this most often in tables they converted a pre existing 5E table or campaign into a Daggerheart game. Initially, when DH first released, I saw many comments online that thought it would simply be a matter of changing up the numbers. But as time has gone on it turns out that creating a truly converted bespoke adversary is not as a simple.

In this series I want to walk through my thought process of converting monsters from the 5E 5.1 SRD into bespoke adversaries for Daggerheart. A few caveats before we begin:

• I love reskinning and I think that's a super valid way to do things. I regularly reskin existing adversaries from the Daggerheart core rulebook for the majority of my sessions and it’s usually my first thought before creating a bespoke monster. The Daggerheart adversaries are so full of flavor it makes it a lot easier to do. I recently reskinned an Acid Burrower to act as an utyguh with just a few small tweaks when I ran In Search of the Smuggler’s Secrets converted to Daggerheart.
• I will be heavily using the Daggerheart homebrew kit and SRD as reference for this series. I think the best starting point is existing material so you can see the lay of the land that you’re working with.
• The Daggerheart devs have talked about in previous videos that some of the keys to adversary design are deciding on its “one cool thing” and what you decide to put emphasis on. What I decide to focus on, might be different than you and that’s totally okay! You have to pull apart the monster and decide what the most important thing is. For more on this I recommend the dev streams on Darrington Press’ YouTube channel and the videos on adversary design by Daggerheart additional designer Mike Underwood.

Now let’s get on to our first victim, the Aboleth!
(I promise we’re not going in alphabetical order, but aboleths have been coming up A Lot in recent Discord discussions for some reason so they’re on my mind)

As we go through this exploration of how I think about creating DH adversaries, I think it’s important to look at the design of the stat blocks themselves. A Daggerheart adversary stat block can be broken into three parts: description, stats, and features.

In the adversary’s description section you get their name, tier, type, a short description of them, and their motives + tactics.

The first thing we need to decide is what tier of adversary we want to make our aboleth. You can choose any tier you like, but for today I’m going to do a rough estimate based on its 5E equivalent. An aboleth is a CR 10 monster, so I’m going to divide that in half because DH has half as many PC levels as 5E, and then I’m going to map it to the DH tiers. This will give us a tier 3 adversary.

Then I want to look at it’s monster type. The DH SRD tells us that, “Solos: present a formidable challenge to a whole party, with or without support.”, which sounds right for our aboleth.

Next, is a short description of the creature. This is where it starts to become important to read through the 5E stat block, and the information about the monster, to decide what flavor we want to make our DH version. The things that jump out to me are:

• It’s considered a Large monster
• It relies heavily on its psionic powers
• It’s covered in a layer of mucus

These descriptors will also help us later when we are designing features for this adversary.

Finally, the last part of this section is the adversary’s motives and tactics. The DH SRD tells us that adversary motives and tactics are, “suggested impulses, actions and goals for the adversary”. This is another spot where the the 5E stat block, and the information about the monster will be useful. This is also where I started flipping through existing DH adversaries to get an idea of the language that they use for their motives and tactics.

The parts that interested me the most here were the aboleth’s Probing Telepathy where it tries to learn its victim’s desires, and it’s Psychic Drain which I think could be narratively connected to using the desires it has learned.

With that, here’s what we have for our DH aboleth so far.

ABOLETH
Tier 3 Solo
A massive psionic eel-like creature covered in mucus
Motives + Tactics: Uncover desires, strike ruthlessly, consume memories

The next section on the adversary stat block is the stats themselves. This is where we’ll be heavily relying on the guidelines from the Daggerheart homebrew kit, and then making adjustments as needed. I also look at the existing DH adversaries to decide how my new adversary measures up. For example, all the other Tier 3 Solos in the DH SRD (except for the Adult Flickerfly) have a Difficulty of 18, and I have no reason to adjust it, so our aboleth will have a Difficulty of 18.

A few other things to call out here:

• I am giving our aboleth 10 HP. From table experience Solos really need 10-12 HP to hang in a fight. PCs tend to do Major damage on average, which means our aboleth will on average last five hits. That is pretty solid for a Solo, however, PCs have lots of ways to increase their output. The damage dealers in your party will find their way to Severe damage without issue. For the encounter I’m envisioning with our aboleth my hope is that each PC will get to strike the creature at least once.
• Getting ahead of ourselves a bit here, but I have an idea in mind for a Feature that costs Stress. For this the homebrew kit says, “Stress costs naturally limit the number of uses of a feature per scene, since most adversaries don’t have a way to clear Stress and a number of PC features cause adversaries to mark Stress”. Because of this I’m giving the aboleth 5 Stress. This will hopefully allow the aboleth to use its Stress feature at least once before it’s defeated, but no more than once per PC.
• Since the aboleth is considered a Large creature in 5E I wanted to make sure that its standard attack reflected that with its range.
• Finally, for the aboleth I chose the Experience “Dominate the Mind”. Not all adversaries need Experiences. The DH SRD tells us, “The GM can spend a Fear to add an adversary’s relevant Experience to raise their attack roll or increase the Difficulty of a roll made against them”. I know some DH GMs don’t feel it’s worth the Fear spend, but even if you don’t use it mechanically I think Experiences are a great way to use both the name and the bonus to indicate something about the adversary.

After consulting the tomes, here’s what we have for our DH aboleth so far.

ABOLETH
Tier 3 Solo
A massive psionic eel-like creature covered in mucus
Motives + Tactics: Uncover desires, strike ruthlessly, consume memories
Difficulty: 18 | Thresholds: 20/35 | HP: 10 | Stress: 5
ATK: +5 | Tentacle: Close 3d10+5 phy
Experience: Dominate the Mind +3

The last section on the adversary stat block are the Features. Adversary features include Passives, Actions, and Reactions in that order. To minimize the cognitive load on the GM we want to avoid overloading our adversary with features. But as a Solo, our aboleth can often have the most features in a given scene, as they will likely be the star of the show.

First up is Passive features. With Solo monsters I tend to default to giving them Relentless (X) so that they can hold their own and be able to act multiple times against the PCs. Since the aboleth is tier 3 I will give it Relentless (3). If I am going to limit any of the features it would like be Passives and Reactions, since those are the ones GMs are going to have to keep in their front of mind. Since there are no other compelling Passives that jump out at me for this creature we will just leave it at Relentless.

For the Actions I wanted to tie in things I pulled for it’s description, motives + tactics, and play into its Experience. For big moves we typically want them to have either a Fear or Stress cost. I ultimately decided to go with a Stress move for the reasons I listed above. Ideally, the aboleth will get to Consume Memories from at least a few of the PCs before it loses that ability.

For Reactions I wanted to focus on converting it’s Mucous Cloud ability into something fitting for Daggerheart. This ability definitely seems like it would give the equivalent of a Condition to a DH PC so that’s what I’ll be focusing on here. We want the unique Conditions to be evocative and tie to the creature, so for this Condition I’m going to go with Slimy. Since the aboleth is considered a Large creature I am also extending the effect from Melee range into Very Close range.

With that we have our final aboleth stat block!

ABOLETH
Tier 3 Solo
A massive psionic eel-like creature covered in mucus
Motives + Tactics: Uncover desires, strike ruthlessly, consume memories
Difficulty: 18 | Thresholds: 20/35 | HP: 10 | Stress: 5
ATK: +5 | Tentacle: Close 3d10+5 phy
Experience: Dominate the Mind +3

FEATURES:
Relentless (3) - Passive: The Aboleth can be spotlighted up to three times per GM turn. Spend Fear as usual to spotlight them
Consume Memories - Action: Mark a Stress to target a creature within Close range. The target must make an Instinct Reaction Roll. On a failure you gain 1d4 as the Aboleth uncovers the target’s fears and desires.
Mucous Cloud - Reaction: When a creature makes a successful attack against the Aboleth within Very Close range they must mark a Stress and become Slimy until their next rest or they clear a Stress. While they are Slimy, they have disadvantage on attack rolls.

Let me know what you think about our aboleth in the comments below! Would you change anything about this creature?

Then, let me know what creature from the 5.1 SRD you’d like to see converted next!

Resources

D&D 5E SRD 5.1
Daggerheart SRD 1.0
Daggerheart Homebrew Kit
Daggerheart Additional Designer Mike Underwood’s Youtube Channel

This product includes materials from the Daggerheart System Reference Document 1.0, © Critical Role, LLC. under the terms of the Darrington Press Community Gaming (DPCGL) License. More information can be found at https://www.daggerheart.com. There are no previous modifications by others.

This work includes material taken from the System Reference Document 5.1 (“SRD 5.1”) by Wizards of the Coast LLC and available at https://dnd.wizards.com/resources/systems-reference-document. The SRD 5.1 is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License available at https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode.