Aberrations and Abominations

Aberrations have always been poorly defined. Sometimes they're just weird, sometimes they're affiliated with Cthulhu. Guides to designing monsters, like A Magical Society: Beast Builder, outright state the distinction is an arbitrary "I'll know it when I see it" sort of thing. That's not a stable foundation for world building, so I'm going to go ahead and give "aberration" a clear definition.

What is an aberration? (abridged and edited, originally from the supremely helpful Legends & Lairs: Darkness & Dread.)

While angels and demons might be alien to a particular world or plane, aberrations are strangers to the concepts of physical reality that bind the cosmos. They originate in alternative dimensions where time, space, and thought have different meanings. They are utterly impossible creatures, yet they exist and can cross over into the world. Their intellects are impossible to fathom, and their motives and reasoning seem capricious or random at best, yet none can deny their great power and seemingly malevolent desires. They tend to take on horrific guises partially because an intelligent mind cannot comprehend their true forms. The cosmos literally spawns a husk of flesh and bone to contain their psychic and physical aspects when they breach the wall into the physical planes.

In plain English: Aberrations are things that literally should not be because the laws of reality prohibit them. Not that those pesky laws stop them from trying. Under Moorcockian cosmic balance, aberrations are associated with Chaos and opposed to Order.

Possibilities:

• The chaos powers predate our reality and wish to destroy it. Wherever they manifest they create aberrations as avatars and proxies.
• Chaos includes infinite possibility. Entities that never had a chance to exist, but are granted a second chance by chaos, manifest as aberrations.
• Mortal creatures may be taken by chaos, deconstructed and reconstructed according to insane geometries, to become aberrations.

15. COPYRIGHT NOTICE

A Magical Society: Beast Builder, Copyright 2005, Expeditious Retreat Press, Author Joseph Browning.

Darkness & Dread Copyright 2004, Fantasy Flight Publishing, Inc.