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Old 10-12-2021, 01:30 PM   #1
Michael Thayne
 
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Join Date: May 2010
Default Using the Eye of Death

The Eye of Death—even more so than other Elder Things—strike me as uniquely puzzling monsters to the point it's not clear how you use them in a campaign. Once they wind up in the material world, how do they spend their time? They don't need to eat or drink, so they're not going to spend time on those problems. Nor do they need to sleep, so they have no reason to stick around a lair where they can sleep in relative safety. They "never negotiate or communicate" (Monsters, p. 27) and implicitly don't even have mouths, which means they're not serving as masterminds. All they seem to care about is killing stuff, especially wizards and Spheres of Madness. Does that mean if there's nothing in the immediate vicinity to kill, they will just seek out more stuff to kill as a full-time job? I have a really hard time seeing how you justify stocking a dungeon with these things, the only way I can see using them is to have them show up at a climactic moment where it's really hit the fan and the PCs need to kill them quick before they get out and start threatening civilization at large.
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Old 10-12-2021, 02:18 PM   #2
Rolando
 
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: Panama
Default Re: Using the Eye of Death

I think, as an elder thing, have some unfathomable motives and may be doing some higher dimension important thing or hobby while in the material plane. maybe they need to be in the material plane to reach some other dimension with it's 7th dimension existence or whatever.

You may make some campaigns with that, it may even look like something very mysterious and interesting, not knowing really what is happening is part of the charm of elder things.

For game purposes the monster is there to be a challenge... unless you do something else or additional with the "elder thing" tropes.
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Old 10-12-2021, 02:26 PM   #3
Dalin
 
Join Date: Dec 2009
Location: Saint Paul, MN
Default Re: Using the Eye of Death

I think they fit well in places tainted by forbidden magic. Maybe they slipped through a portal as it was closing. Maybe evil cultists summoned one or more in their subterranean temple where they act as de facto guardians. Maybe there's a tainted wilderness where they are sprouting from warped plants. I use them to indicate wrongness in the world.

But, yeah, they are classic monsters designed for a particular mechanical challenge with very little ecological window dressing. I have often used them in one-shots because they are freaky and require the party to use unusual tactics.
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Old 10-13-2021, 09:20 AM   #4
Polkageist
 
Join Date: Sep 2007
Default Re: Using the Eye of Death

With Elder Things, their puzzling place in the greater world's ecology can be an asset rather than a hindrance. By being so alien in their motivations and needs the justification for them in any given spot is more a metagame consideration of "these would be interesting to be here" with no in-world justification really needed.

Or rather, nobody in-world would have the capability to know for sure what it wants beyond empirical evidence of what an Evil Eye is doing at any given moment. Maybe it'll put together a picture, but like most Elder Things their greater plan (if you can call it that) has twists and directions that will appear completely arbitrary to an observer.

Dalin's got a good use though, indicators of "wrongness" or something like a hernia in reality where outside things are leaking in. They could be harbingers of other weird stuff like Ramexes, Spheres, etc. and weird investigators of bizarrely mundane things like a tree or a rock that looks utterly boring to folks but for some reason is attracting eyes. Play up the weird, the wrongness, and the utter lack of reason for an Eye to be in a particular place. They show up where they shouldn't, and that's what makes them so scary.
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