Beholders

The Naen Vormak are a savage elvish tribe who live in far undiscovered territory in the Desolate North. They are a small tribe, pushed to the brink by other bigger, stronger tribes. Their blood-magic is thin, and they have few sons, so they have no choice but to squat at the edge of the World Glacier, scrabbling and scavenging for what scraps they can get in that truly inhospitable place.

The Naen Vormak are not popular people. They're nasty, dirty, and brutish. If there are fewer of them than there are of you, they're servile and obsequious, but useless; they lie, cheat, and steal whenever they think they can get away with it. If there are more of them than there are of you, they'll turn violent, kill you or enslave you, and pillage your camp.

Some of the other elvish nomad tribes have stories of a time before the coming of the cold and the advancement of the wastes, when the Desolate North was a place of plenty. In these legends, they lived in forests and caves, shaped to their pleasure and housing many elves. Game abounded, the cold did not bite so much, their magics were stronger, and they had time for arts and pursuits which have since been lost.

The Naen Vormak also have such stories, but theirs take a different turn. Back in the time of legends, their forefather found something. Something deep, dark, underground. Something he dared not share with his friends, but that demanded his allegiance and that of his family, and that still does.

Every ten years a small party of the Naen Vormak head south. They dodge through lands claimed by other, bigger tribes bringing children to sacrifice to their god.

If their god is pleased with the sacrifice (the children disappear without a trace), his rantings commence. Pouring into their minds come secrets. Sometimes they learn of the future, sometimes of the past. Sometimes (the most precious and secret times), they learn of their god.

Their god was wounded long ago in a forgotten battle with mighty forces. He cannot leave his lair, and rests simply on the floor in a little nest of gifts and cast-offs made for him by the Naen Vormak. His huge spherical bulk rarely moves, and then only shifts a little across the floor. Sometimes he blesses or curses them with his gaze, settling his great milky eye or one of his many smaller roving eyes upon them.

A man knowledgeable about such things would call him a Beholder. A man more knowledgeable about such things would note that this is the oldest and largest Beholder ever chronicled.

From their god, the Naen Vormak have learned some little about Beholders. Sometimes, they have even caught glimpses of the sights of other gods.

Or, perhaps they are right: these are all manifestations of one God.

According to the Naen Vormak, in the Beginning Times before the World-Egg cracked and spilled Reality across the cosmos, this God had no name, and he blindly groped his way through the unformed chaos. As such He is older and stranger than the other gods, many of whom spilt out of the World-Egg with everything else. But when He blundered into Reality, in His blindness He smelt it, felt it, tasted it. He pushed against it, stretched it. Eventually He pressed through it, in places, and in those places His being became enfleshed, in an act of cosmic irony, as eyes. Eyes of the Blind God. The Blind God could now see.

Whatever a Beholder sees, all other Beholders also see. Whenever one is killed, all know who, where, and when. As manifestations of the Blind God they all have their own minds, unhinged and unfathomable.


Fortunately Beholders are usually not much for vengeance. Usually.

A particularly daring or desperate man might find a way to obtain information from a Beholder about the doings or surroundings of its brethren. If the legends are true, the forefather of the Naen Vormak may have been just such a man.

Still the best

Other notable fauna in the Forest of Fog

I started off the last post with just an idea of "Desert hyacinth monster" and it grew from there. Aaaand then I kind of went overboard with the monster description; nobody needs umpteen paragraphs on a single gimmick plant. So here's some more information on the Forest of Fog for anyone who's interested.

Denizens of the Forest of Fog

The first thing to remember is that there are no animals. Most everything that tries to kill you is going to be a plant, because the plants eat everything else.

There are the hyacinths of course. But there are some others. These are just samples; the Mad Elven King was really, really into horticulture.

Shattergrass
More of a trap than a monster, shattergrass is a delicate, transparent green grass that almost looks to be made from spun glass. From a distance, it looks normal. It grows in patches, usually in gaps in the trees (which it sometimes causes). In the dim light of the forest, it can be hard to tell from regular grass - not that there's much of either.

When disturbed by anything stronger than a gentle wind, shattergrass breaks into thousands of razor-sharp shards, like really thin slivers of broken glass. Basically, moving through a patch of shattergrass is going to cost you 1d6 hp and possibly shred your footgear or leggings.

Weeping bromeliads
Like their more mundane cousins, these live on the branches of trees. Unlike their more mundane cousins, they hijack trees.

Trees with a large number of weeping bromeliads on them will have trunks and branches stained a deep red from the juices of the flowering plant. They will also move whenever anything larger than a cat walks by, because the bromeliads are territorial and don't like invaders.

Stats as a treant, only most of the trees are sessile, and have 1d10 + 3 bromeliads all over the branches. Trees with ten or more bromeliads may even uproot themselves temporarily to chase off the party.
(7HD version, treants go up to 12): HD 7; AC 2[17]; Atk 2 strikes (2d6); Move -- or 3; Save 9; ML 12; CL/XP 7/600

Hangman's moss
Here's another trap-monster. This looks a lot like like Spanish moss, except maybe even longer. It likes to form long curtains, hanging in the air and waving listlessly on any light breeze. Close inspection will show a small assortment of insects, birds, and an occasional bat caught in the curtain and dessicated.

Anyone touching a sufficient amount of the moss (a couple clumps is fine, but a curtain is dangerous) must save vs. poison or be paralyzed. (Elves are not immune.) Anyone so caught will be slowly dessicated, losing 1hp/round as the moss sucks out their bodily fluids. Losing 6 or more hit points in this fashion at a time may cost the character either 1 CON or 1 CHA at the discretion of the GM.

Suggestive forsythia
(The name sucks. Sorry. Feel free to suggest a better one; I'll probably adopt it.) These bushes were magically bred from their mundane cousins in an attempt by the Mad King to create "someone who finally understands me!" They are telepathic.

Many are just lonely and looking for someone to talk to. However, all are subtly (or not so subtly) mad - whether from the original process or the long isolation or just their alien natures, its hard to say. 

Only 1 in 6 elves can actually hold something like a conversation with them; everyone else just gets creepy crawly feelings in the back of the skull and an occasional burst of suggestive emotion - save vs charm or be given a two-word suggestion. (Anything obviously life-threatening or morally contrary requires no save.) The forsythia are also accomplished chromatophores, changing the colors of their flowers in various different patterns. This allows a few of them to cast spells via complicated, rapid color shifts. They favor charm effects and other emotion/perception altering spells.

Suggestive forsythia: HD 2; AC 7 (9 vs fire); Atk None; Move --; Save 17; ML 8; CL/XP 2/30
Can cast 1 2nd level and 2 1st level spells per day. Example spell list: Charm Person - Faerie Fire - Phantasmal Force

Warpwood
It's hard to say what these trees look like, because anyone wandering within 50ft of them falls prey to an hallucinatory effect that subtly changes the terrain, cloaking certain objects and giving the illusion of progress when in fact they are walking in circles. Once this is noticed ("Hey, I think we passed that tree a couple times before!") the illusion is broken - in game terms, give a secret save every fifteen minutes or so. The thing that makes these nasty is that other, more dangerous plants will often live nearby and be altered by the effect so as not to be noticed until too late. (If this happens, the effect is broken immediately - it doesn't stand up to direct contradiction.

Travellers who are aware of the danger and alert get a save against the effect when they first wander in. Roll once for the leader of a party.

The bark of the warpwood tree contains a powerful hallucinogen that when properly prepared and boiled into a tea gives visions. These are usually relaxing and pleasant, but can occasionally evoke powerful emotions - fear, loathing, lust, despair. There may even be a way for a shaman to use it for a vision-quest of sorts (like use of the Commune spell, with no level requirements, but only 1 question). Overuse, especially of potent concoctions, can lead to all kinds of nasty effects best left to the DM.

One 'dose' - a given tree will have enough easily reachable bark for 50 or so, if you want to carry a bunch of bark around - is probably worth 5gp to the right buyer.

That's great, but how do I use this?

Good question. Once the players figure out the gimmick of the place, the solution is simple: stay away from the plants. They mostly can't come after you.

The solution to this is to put them near/around something the players wan to investigate and so much brave the dangers of the plants to do so, or to place them in such a way that the players don't know until it's too late that they're wandering into danger. (Warpwood is an example way to do this latter one, but if you use 'it's a mind-screwy tree!' too often, your players will probably get angry.)

Concrete examples, as well as notable areas of the Forest of Fog and random encounters should be forthcoming shortly, like in the next post.