What are some of the absolute worst things you can imagine an Aboleth doing? I've heard they can be pretty nightmarish...

Raiding villages using weapons specifically designed to inject or spray the victim with aboleth slime, making them unable to breath air and turning their skin gelatinous. In fact, wouldn't an aboleth make mad cash by selling mucus and slime to warring nations as a medieval mustard gas?

I've never come across an Aboleth, what're they about?

>handholding and missionary
This tired old meme needs to die. It hasn't been funny for years.

Specifically to fuck over martials. Basically everything in the monster manual is geared towards killing martials, with few exceptions for magic resistant creatures.

You don't think bestiality is disgusting and terrifying?

user didn't say consensual.

Damn, I like this art. Nice discerning alien look while also looking a bit too much like a primitive deep sea creature, which I'm slightly uncomfortable ascribing advanced intelligence and ambition to. Aboleth designs in general are good, but a bit too easy to become comfortable with.
Fairly certain abominations don't count as beasts.

this is a blue board, user

The aboleths in my campaign are going to be major villains, and a missing Paladin NPC that's an important part of the paladin's backstory was captured by them as a test subject. Paladins, with their immunity to disease and divine grace, plus all their auras, are a uniquely tough nut for the Aboleths to crack.

So they drowned and revived the paladin, over and over and over, to see if they could crack the Aura of Courage and induce a fear response to water. When that failed, they started alternating between taking away the paladin's ability to breathe air and infecting them with slime to torture them by keeping them in an air-filled room to suffocate and dry out before being revived again and the previous drown-and-revive torture.

This was mostly to test the limits of the air-breather's strongest defenders, however, as they were also bio-engineering a plague that paralyzes the lungs of creatures that can't breathe water. I'm curious how the players are going to react when they reach some NPC villages that just have everyone in them dead without a mark on them and no trace of magic.

But what do they do and why?