If an Abberation like a Mind Flayer / Beholder / Aboleth was adopted and raised in a good environment from birth, would it grow up to be good alignment /tg/?
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idk
I remember that there was a story about a good illithid, dunno about the beholders though
I thought beholders were some other monster that mutates into a beholder when it learns Ultimate Magic.
Beholders "reproduce" by dreaming other beholders into existence, which they immediately fight due to their paranoia.
depends on what it is
there's several instances of otyughs being used as semi-tamed sewage disposal monsters
there's a few instances of mind flayers being good once they are separated from their elder brain
I really don't think a beholder could ever be good, their fricking paranoid lizardbrains just don't function that way
One of them eats brains of still alive sapient beings, there's no way that shit can be "good"
What if it went back in time and only ate the brain of baby hitler?
hitler paved the way for the existence of the state of israel, is was a good person
>eating the baby version of people that did literally nothing wrong
>is this good?!?
Are you moronic?
>caused the largest slaughter of white europeans of all time
>nothing wrong
WW1 had more white european casualties than WW2
And that wasn't enough for hitler even though he witnessed it personally
>easily googlable no-game no-setting ethics question
Check the wiki and quit spamming
>uh... I know this is a board all about using your imagination... but don't you DARE try to have fun
Correct.
>Fricking abominations spawning from the far realm
They're lovecraftian tier beings beyond any comprehensible moral compass and their very presence corrupts the prime. Also fricking aboleths have racial memory, mindflayers are quite literally sentient tumors and beholders are hardwired psychotic predatory narcissists, frick your grey/gay morality, the only answer to any question regarding them is "kill with fire, fast".
If you didn't keep spamming these pointless threads, would you die or something?
It would be extremely painful
Sure, so long as said environment is good for decomposition of their dead body. They can be good for the rest of eternity.
>Mind Flayer
They are created, not born.
>Beholder
Hyper narcissist incapable of emotional bonds as it conflicts with the supremacy of their own being.
>Aboleth
They have been alive longer than the universe.
>the exact same thread with a different image
jannies close discord and do your jobs
Mind Flayer are under light brainwashing from birth. Probably *could* be good without it.
Beholder are paranoid as frick. Doesn't leave much margin for good 'cause they can snap at any moment.
Aboleth have ancestral memory. How you educate them is nearly irrelevant compared to whatever their ancestors thought.
So we're on to Nature versus Nurture in fictitious monsters now. This doesn't even work on humanoid monsters. See Sweden as proof.
That's no way to talk about the grenade gang immigrants, anon.
Does rat that grew up in a stable become horse?
We need more domesticated unholy abominations in media.
>We need more domesticated unholy abominations in media.
Please no.
there's plenty, just watch some older stuff
No, because they are unknownable otherworldly entities with entirely different perceptions abd interactions with reality. Also mindflayers need to eat brains.
All three of those examples have lifecycles completely unsuitable to "raising from a baby" but if you want a good aligned abberation there are always flumphs.
>Mind Flayer
they're sentient and malevolent from birth so no
>Aboleths
they're like a million years old and I think also have ancestral memory and used to own the entire planet before being forced underwater
>Beholder
They reproduce by budding/dreaming another into reality, and can at least be reasoned with and negotiated with. Xanathar is literally a famous Lawful Evil Beholder mob boss who can easily be dealt with in good faith and isn't just a mindless monster. Presumably it Xanathar dreamt up an offspring he might be Lawful Neutral or Neutral Good as a rebellion against daddy dearest. I could also see a beholder mage potentially becoming a faithful of Mystra and begrudgingly putting up with magic mommy's rules to not be evil because she's the source of all magic (well, unless you count the Shadow Weave but that's a whole different deal) and he doesn't wanna be put in time-out.
You can also always just cheat and hit them with a Helm of Opposite Alignment when they're too small and weak to resist, but that's probably too close to mindrape for most tables to be comfortable with. Still totally the kind of thing a dickass neutral wizard would try just to see what happens when you get a Chaotic Good Mind Flayer. What does he do, move to Canada and only eat the brains of people signing up for Canadian healthcare?
On the topic of "non-evil feeding for mind flayers" could you feed one with a Hydra? They constantly regrow severed heads, with brain included. At that point it's more like donating blood or bone marrow than eating brains, but to be truly Good you'd need a hydra capable of consenting to having one of its brains occasionally eaten. Maybe in Sigil you could have this as a one-off gag. Or some species that revived even after death (can Revenant brains be eaten?)
The statblock specifies humanoid, so a hydra would be off the table, as would an undead like a revenant.
I imagine there's two-headed giants somewhere around the world, those are a fantasy staple- so you could repeatedly have it eat one brain and then regenerate it magic.
Giants are also Giants, not Humanoids
that's a 5e only restriction. In 3.5 mind flayers can extract brains from any creature with a brain up to one side category larger than it, so nothing stops a mind flayer from eating the brains of a hydra
Even within the "humanoid" limitation, there a plenty of evil aligned humanoids. A mind flayer eating a goblin brain is no more evil than a Ranger animal companion eating the rest of the goblin.
That would imply the anaconda wasn't being properly fed to begin with.
You can have a duck, snake or fish from its birth to its death, wont make it cease being a duck, snake or fish respectively, nor behaving in any significant way unlike one would, except for maybe being weak and lazy from comfort and safety it got.
No.
Aberrations are aberrations because they are alien in thought and action, inscrutable minds of hostile morality. To reduce them to a cartoonish pastiche of humanity would do them a disservice.
>Abberation
Guess how I know you have a negative INT modifier.
Best I can do is Chaotic Neutral
>Mind Flayers
Assuming you were able to remove one from the influence of or kill the brain, they would most likely be killed/starved out because they survive by eating brains, and that is not a readily available resource for most "good aligned" people... So probably not, but it is possible if the food source was figured out, at best could be allied with for a common goal.
>Beholder
Doubtful, they are created by other beholders dreaming of beholders, and they can become real from what i recall. And their minds are so alien that they spend their life in total paranoia that they would probably kill everyone around it if it couldn't outright subjugate the surrounding people.
>Aboleth
NO! they are specifically born with the knowledge of their ancestors memories baked in, so they would automatically try to subjugate anyone around it because they believe that everything in existence is theirs because their a species of hipsters that was around before existence was cool.
Of all the Abberations that could possibly good-aligned, Beholders are the least likely. One of the defining characteristics of a beholder is unparalleled narcissism and self-serving motivations. Each Beholder thinks they are the pinnacle of biologic evolution, even against other Beholders. They very rarely if ever engage in anything but insane hostility towards anything that is alive and isn't themselves or doesn't belong to them. They delight in the pain and suffering of others, especially if they are the ones inflicting it. When they dream, quite often their surroundings manifest the dream to become real, and usually it dreams of itself which then becomes real. Beholders will kill each other over a slight difference in appearance between each other, which makes them extremely paranoid. These paranoid, magic wielding manifestations of destruction, anger, hate and fear automatically assume (and is usually right) that every other creature in the world is out to get them, and yet at the same time it believes it is entitled to everything the world has to offer.
tl:dr, Beholders are floating incels towards all of existence and it is extremely good at killing things...
if you can come up with an interesting situation/adventure based on the idea, i'd say sure. if it goes too much against the grain of the game, i'd hold off.
No.
Every being mentioned starts it's existence completely developed from a mental perspective. You can't raise them good because other than physical growth for the Aboleth and Beholder, they are already 'adults'.
There apparently are two beholders in lore who deviated considerably from the usual evil alignment. Thing is, one of them became good through literal learn-all-knowledge-in-the-universe kind of enlightenment, while the other was a freak of nature who was treated as an abomination by his own kind (he also partnered up with a similarly shunned good-aligned illithid, also a freak by his own kind's standards and treated as such). So while it doesn't seem to be entirely impossible for a beholder to not be evil, it requires extreme circumstances like transcendence or being wired wrong since birth because of a mutation or something like that.
Now if one of these two beholders decided to spawn offspring, it could potentially be the beginning of a lineage of non-evil beholders. And similarly, if it was possible for one typical beholder to spawn a non-evil one, it can theretically happen again. But it doesn't seem like beholders can "learn" or be reeducated to be good through typical means.
so one became enlightened and one was moronic... interesting...
Not really moronic, I don't think his cognitive abilities were affected, just wired differently. Autistic would probably be a somewhat more fitting label.
Large Luigi my beloved
https://forgottenrealms.fandom.com/wiki/Large_Luigi
No
Abberations are inherently evil, same as orcs, goblinoids, gnolls and southerners
Raise them with an affluent white family
You'll find they commit much less crimes, are less likely to partake in illicit substances, and will seek out higher paying and more respected means of employment.
You will find that your "dark folk" raised this way seeking to help their community as healers, paladins, and artificers instead of thuggish barbarians, bardic con men, and cutthroat thieves..
There was a girl with an anaconda she had since childhood and loved it a lot and even slept with it that went to the veterinarian because the serpent was suddenly puking for no reason.
The veterinarian had to explain her the anaconda was emptying it's stomach to eat her.
So she gave the anaconda to a zoo.
moronic urban legend peddled by gullible idiots
Sounds less like an urban legend and more like a fable
>he believed the Faceberg boomer apocrypha enough to post it here
shiggy diggy doo lads
Ideally, any aberration would respond to a 'good' environment in an unpredictable way, any such story should be written so as to emphasize the inherent differences in their outlooks and psychologies even if the aberration isn't necessarily evil.
behavior is 90% genetic 10% environment
Demons.
>Beholder
>Literal clone of a scitschophrenic absolute xenophobe
>On regaining consciousness: *Target.rich.enviroment(is.true) Engage.slaughter.engage
>Mind Flayer
>Whoops, still copyrighted by some beach-bum sorcerers
>This is Brain Raper that wakes up and eats brains, but you know, adorably
>Aboleth, Abloth, Gobloth, other Donut Steel oh-so-edgy bad dude
>...Yeah, sure you can play as one. These are the factions that will kill your character at sight.
If a beholder could overcome its extreme paranoia it would probably become more social and kind
Wasn't one of the Lords of Waterdeep a "reasonable" Beholder?
OP wants to run a campaign where the BBEG dies to the power of friendship.
OOTS has a good beholder in the most recent strips
No. They are the pitbulls of D&D.
Always possible (Drizzt was a good drow back when drow were an always-evil race) but less likely the further back you go into D&D history. The IP's stance on the nature versus nurture debate has shifted considerably towards nurture in the last couple decades.
"Always Evil" never meant always Evil, more like predominantly Evil
That's not true and you know it.
I think it goes against the aesthetic and the intention and the spirit of what an "aberration" is. It's in the name.
Aberrations are portrayed best through the lense of alien morality.
Can you have a friendly aberration/Far Realmer/etc. in your game? The one that with scary genuinity wants to help your characters? Of course.
Perhaps its evil to an unfathomable degree but its machinations lie on such a vast scale so far removed from where PC operate that it can both spare time for a good chat (communication barriers be damned) and can help PCs out, since it might align with its own long-spanning agenda.
Perhaps something else.
Being evil and friendly and helpful doesn't necessarily mean its gonna end with betrayal within the span of your campaign. Many classic stories and games have evil characters helping out the main hero out of obligation or for some other reason.
An aboleth seems like the best candidate as it lacks the etreme territoriality and agression of a beholder and unfortunate feeding needs of a mind flayer.
no, like most minorities they harbor inherent and deep-seated insecurities that manifest in remarkably obscure and difficult to discern ways. they're sort of like those fricked up pitbull dogs in the sense that they can, on the surface, appear capable of perfunctory normality but in reality it is a meagre performative affectation that is always one minor annoyance or imagined slight away from explosive and violent overreaction. Evil races raised 'good' are only really 'good' in the sense that they are passably able to imitate the behaviors of those around them for fear of reprisal, but they have no inherent drive or motivation beyond that fear to keep to that role assigned to them.
Beholder: instinctual hatred of every living thing that perverts the great mother (their god)’s form. Which just so happens to be identical to their own. Beholders are so racist they’ve been known to find fault with their own reflection.
Illithid: putting aside the fact that illithid need to kill sapient creatures to both live and reproduce, they’re biologically incapable of feeling any positive emotions, aside from the one that they feel when they eat a brain, which they’ll sometimes broadcast to the creature whose brain they’re eating to add some spice
Aboleth: Are essentially born fully grown, from a mental perspective. Each Aboleth has both an eiditic and genetic memory, meaning that each Aboleth perfectly remembers every single thing their parent or parents (they’re capable of self fertilization iirc) did until the moment of their birth, which means they have an unbroken chain of memory stretching back to the first Aboleth, which happens to be well before life even crawled onto land.
So in short, no, not unless you’re playing an edition that’s too scared to depict sapient creatures as being anything other than humans in funny outfits.
No.
Total freakshit death.