Lords of Madness: I love this terrible fucking book!

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Lords of Madness: I love this terrible fucking book!

Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

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Let us go back 9 years. The 3.5 monster series started with the solid Draconomicon (still waiting for my fucking dragonling sidekick, assholes!), and the somewhat craptacular but still salvageable Libris Mortis. Next in line was Lords of Madness, a book around aberrations. I couldn't tell you why they picked Aberrrations (a type noteworthy for having nothing to fucking do with each other) instead of a more common and less varied monster type (Why the fuck didn't Giants get a book? Giants are awesome!). This book is fucking awful in a lot of ways, I won't lie. But in its awfulness there's a lot of shit I've ganked for my own use. But come, the tentacle monsters are waiting...
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

Chapter 1: What is an Aberration?

Holy fucking shit, a Lukacs art I actually kind of like.
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This chapter goes through a lot of ways to explain where aberrations come from. Some of it is very good and neat and ripe for a nice, vigorous deflowering. Some of it is incredibly stupid too. Some are both awesome and stupid.

Your aliens can come from the following places:

1. Space. A classic, and people like me that were introduced to fantasy through the Final Fantasy and Fantasy Star games, or trippy Philip Jose Farmer novels will dig this, there is precedent for mixing sci-fi and fantasy (even Star Wars has wizards and magic swords and shit). Props for mentioning Spelljammer, that setting was fucking awesome.

2. Time. Either they come from so far in the past or they're time travelers from a strange and alien future. They use the word "antediluvian" a lot, which tells me that they don't know what it means. Neither did I, so I looked it up, it means before the biblical flood. Now, I soiled myself looking at Young Earth Creationist cites, and that happened in 2300 bc according to them (I'm assuming they know their own mythology in this, because although I can point out that's retarded I can't really argue that's not what their holy texts say). That's actually not that long ago, other than a few extinctions the creatures of that time weren't THAT different to consider them aliens. I'm pretty sure I could make a burger out of a cow from classical Akkadia and it wouldn't make me grow tentacles or have three eyestalks or look like a squid. Also: Yet ANOTHER mind flayer retcon: they come from the FUTURE!!!!11!1! I think this is about when I started getting fucking sick of mind flayers and the assorted wankery due to WotC needlessly changing them...

There's also an "otherwhen" timeline that represents some sort of temporal monkeying that changed the timeline, with mention that nothing comes from then. I used flumphs that came from otherwhens. Players will take flumphs seriously if you describe them properly. (Note: Pathfinder turned them into clumsy intergalactic champions of good. The line between awesome and stupid is very thin here...)

3. Different planes. Yet more far realm shit that every book in 3e had to use. I'd be more impressed if I didn't see nearly the exact same verbiage in every book since Gate of Firestorm Peak. I tried to shoehorn the Far Realm into my campaign world, I couldn't find a way to do it that didn't feel hamfisted and forced. The Ethergaunts get a mention. Those guys are awesome and hardcore, but don't appear in this book.

4. Dreams of Mad Gods. A little out there for me, but stands up in folklore.

5. Finally magical mutation. A WIZARD DID IT is probably the weakest, cocksuckingest excuse you could make.
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There is a huge sidebar about Chuuls. I don't give a fuck about chuuls. This massive sidebar doesn't make me give a fuck about chuuls. Can someone, ANYONE tell me why Chuuls were pushed so fucking hard in 3e? I don't remember them before the 3e MONSTESOUR MANUEL.

There's a bit describing the MO's in aberrations. They like to be in charge, they are alien, and they are somehow unnatural. The author thinks aberrations are a pretty cool guy, eh is alein and doesn't afraid of anything. They are also emotionless and clinically detached from their work (that doesn't scream alien to me, because that's easy for me to understand...) There's also an EXTREMELY sexy dwarf beholder cultist as an illustration.

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unf...

Where was I? Oh yeah, finishing the chapter. There's a bunch of garbage about how learning stuff from aberrations makes you insane and you should ditch the Aboleth Wizard's spellbook and smash all the Mind Flayer's power stones and other bullshit. Which I wouldn't know one wizard or psion player that wouldn't immediately pounce on the forbidden objects to murderhobo. Also: no game mechanics reflect this so-called corruptive influence.

Here is where we get into some legitimately bad advice rather than just blathering about things you might not care about. Aberration campaigns are supposed to end in TPK. And you're supposed to make it harder on the players if they prepare for fighting them. So getting an aberration bane lochaber axe or taking them as a favored enemy means the MC is supposed to kill the party even harder. I don't need to describe how that's bogus.

It also tells you to buy the Psionics handbook because WotC likes money it's more ALIEN and your players wont' know what to do about it. Every group I have been in has had at least 1 psionics fanboy that knew more about psionics then the MC typically did (although that was typically me...) Also: Buy the D&D Joke Book and the most metal of all supplements, the Book of VD!!1!!ONE1!.

That's enough for me, I need to consume some proteins before I hit chapter 2: The Deep Masters. Stick around, it starts to get WILD!
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Post by Koumei »

Yeah, that book is good, bad and ugly. Presumably it's just reviving people's love of Illithiad and Eye, Tyrant. Or "people dig the mind flayer and beholder, two of our most iconic monsters we own. Do they have anything in common we can tie in to milk for money? Oh, they share a type!"
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:Also: Yet ANOTHER mind flayer retcon: they come from the FUTURE!!!!11!1! I think this is about when I started getting fucking sick of mind flayers and the assorted wankery due to WotC needlessly changing them...
I thought it was always "far future (evolution* of psionic humans?), they fucked up when their slaves (the united gith) rioted, and went back in time, via the Far Realm (TM), to a safer time when they could try again and also try to wipe the gith out so they didn't make that mistake againin the first place. And the gith split into two groups afterwards, the Zerai and Yankees, and now in the present they're two separate races because hey look, cocaine!"

What was it originally? What retcons happened between that and now?

*Pokemon style evolution, not Science style
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Post by Blicero »

I'm pretty sure the Chuul sidebar originally appeared in a Dragon article. It's slightly less depressing to think of the Dragon people commissioning a lengthy piece of Chuul fanfiction, I think.

That being said, Chuuls are pretty badass. They have an appearance that's easy enough to grok and vaguely interesting abilities. And they got a wotc mini, which is cool.

I have a soft spot for Lords of Madness, despite a lot of it being dumb. If you're looking to get grossed out, it's kind of fun to read about the physiology of aboleths and beholders.
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Post by Ancient History »

The sad thing about this book is that most of the fluff material appeared elsewhere; I'm pretty sure the Beholder stuff is almost entirely taken from Monstrous Ecology articles in Dragon. The sadder thing is that the bulk of the mechanics are laughably bad, except where they're ludicrously overpowered. It interacts really weirdly with the books that came after it too...I remember Eberron had some weird optional rule or something that let you count Aberration Blood feats as Aberrant Feats and it was basically a recipe for playing teenage mutants. Hell, if you add some of the crazy class-options from Unearthed Arcana I'm pretty sure you can just about start out able to wild shape into any aberration the same size as you.
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

Koumei wrote:
What was it originally? What retcons happened between that and now?
the 1E Monter Manual just describes them as living underground. I believe 2E and 3.0 went with the "Aliens" route. Lords of Madness fucked around with it.

Next entry pending...
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Post by Prak »

That whole "Stand here with a hand on a shoulder/head high statue" pose seems strangely popular. I'm thinking it's a standard model pose in figure drawing classes, since Dwarven Beholder Cultist and Thong-Lidda are by two different artists.
Count Arioch the 28th wrote:
Koumei wrote:
What was it originally? What retcons happened between that and now?
the 1E Monter Manual just describes them as living underground. I believe 2E and 3.0 went with the "Aliens" route. Lords of Madness fucked around with it.

Next entry pending...
There's one pictured in 1e adventure Expedition to the Barrier Peaks:
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So in Greyhawk, at least, Mind Flayers are aliens. Possibly aliens from the future.
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Post by Koumei »

Ah, aliens. I'm cool with that, especially if it means you get to board/capture the totally rad Illithid Spelljammers. Or just go full Phantasy Star. Either one works.

That said, I also don't mind time travelling mind flayers that cause themselves to exist and go up to Gith shouting WHERE IS SARAH CONNOR?
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Post by Prak »

That's kind of the route I'm taking in my Greyhawk game. The illithids are time traveling aliens. They grew beyond the limits of metallurgy so far that they actually forgot that metal was even useful, because they could do everything they need with biotech and designer crystals. The original mind flayers on Oerth came from another planet, looking for new feed stock. They went through a wormhole or purposely decided to go to the past, and landed a ship on ancient Oerth. Well, I say landed,--more like crashed. And I say a ship--it was actually several. So some future-flayers stumbled out of the crash and began to subjugate Oerth to the new Aberration Kingdom (as hinted at in the Bionomicon), while others were stuck in stasis for a while. Some of the ones in stasis woke up when the Baklunish and Suloise were doing their big magic stuff, and insinuated their way into the Suloise, taking control of the people. Humans turn out to be the perfect species for ceremorphosis/horrifying illithid breeding programs/that fresh brain taste, so the Suloise developed a culture which exalted humans as the best of the best. The secret illithid masters stayed hidden behind secret societies and magic disguises, but they did institute designer servitors--floating magic-nullifying arbiters of the "peace" and constructors of prisons and monuments. Oh, and the reason the Suloise and Baklunish were so pissed at each other? Mind Flayers love Brain-stuffed Dates, so there were tons and tons of raids on the Baklunish by pale skinned sorcerers that came from the direction of the Suel Imperium.

Eventually, the mind flayers got a bright idea for an epic spell that would teleport large numbers of baklunish brains right out of their skulls into a giant crystal cereal bowl, and handed the spell to their suel slave-sorcerers, hiding their laughter. Meanwhile, the time-traveling Gith who went to aid the Baklunish in their fight with the evil mind flayers handed them a giant fuck all psionic super-weapon. Thus the Twin Cataclysms.

As time went on, the suloise forgot their ancient deeds, but remembered that humans were great, and large, rotund things would drive them to assault anything that wasn't an ivory skinned human, and the beholderkin taskmasters became Wastri, the frog-god of human supremacy which the Scarlet Brotherhood worship.
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Post by K »

I think Chuuls were one of the more popular minis, but don't quote me on that.
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Post by Koumei »

I can't remember which one is a Chuul and which one is an Umber Hulk. Aren't they both giant crustaceans that have tendrils from the mouth and they have some kind of (tendril? psywave?) attack that causes Stunning or Paralysis or Confusion or something?
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Post by Nebuchadnezzar »

Chuuls have 6 limbs, pincers, and their facial tentacles cause paralysis. Umber hulks have 4 limbs, claws, mandibles, and their 4 eyes can cause confusion.
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Post by TiaC »

Umber Hulk: Bug-ape with mandibles and confusion gaze.

Chuul: Giant lobster with paralyzing grapple.
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Post by Darth Rabbitt »

There are also Carrion Crawlers, which are worms with paralyzing tentacles that grow out of their face.
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

Chapter 2: The Deep Masters

This chapter talks about Aboleths, one of my favorite masterminds. I've run these guys multiple times, but my players have never killed any.

Aboleths have a weird racial memory thing where they can remember all the way back through all their ancestors' memories. To my knowledge (correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe this is the first time that's been written. Whatever, it's awesome). There's a bunch of weird biological things going on. When aboleths dry out, they become like stone, but live until moistened. Sounds like something that can be used...

This has resulted in kind of a species-wide atheism, as all the aboleths remember a time before all the gods even existed.
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There's some half-assed aboleth variants. I'm going to disagree with Frank and say that flying aboleths are fucking awesome though.

There's a PrC for aboleths called the Aboleth Savant. It has a bunch of shit you won't care about, but it's a 5/5 spellcaster class, and it gives +4 to one mental stat (untyped, so go nuts).

There's some aboleth feats. Most of them affect their snot cloud. It increases the transformation speed, the range, halves speed, and adds a dex poison. There are also feats to give them a bite attack. Who the fuck thought they needed that? None of these feats really do anything.

There's a bunch of aboleth glyphs with low save DCs. Except the one that give -4 to saving throws versus snot.

It wouldn't be a D&D supplement with ancient alien evils without some Lovecraft wank. Here we have a bunch of made-up "elder evils" and I'm not going to pay too much attention to them.

Another stupid thing: You need trumpets and instruments to speak Aboleth for some reason.
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The book spends too many pages on aboleths interacting with other races and cities and stuff, and I'm not going over it. There's also terrible advice on how to advance aboleths with character levels. they can stack a lot of fighter levels on theri CR, but that doesn't matter because fighters are no longer relevant...

There's a sample NPC and a sample adventure. The sample NPC is an aboleth wizard, the adventure is a a fairly standard dungeon crawl with some really gross parts (there's a rape dungeon to breed monsters. That is beyond my squick limit...)
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Post by Josh_Kablack »

Sigh. It would be nice if any paid writer had actually comprehended the way Aboleths work.

Here's the short version:

Behind the solid stone wall illusion which you successfully disbelieved is a brick wall with a rusty iron grate padlocked shut. Do you wish attempt to break through the next one y/n? Repeat up to 104 times, or until until the party finishes drowning in the Mirage Arcana that they thought was breathable air. Also, anyone with a will save of +14 or lower who isn't immune to Mind-Affecting effects gets to auto-lose when separated from the party by any of those illusion walls.
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Post by darkmaster »

Assuming your GM says illusions work at all.
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Post by Wiseman »

Count Arioch the 28th wrote:Here is where we get into some legitimately bad advice rather than just blathering about things you might not care about. Aberration campaigns are supposed to end in TPK. And you're supposed to make it harder on the players if they prepare for fighting them. So getting an aberration bane lochaber axe or taking them as a favored enemy means the MC is supposed to kill the party even harder. I don't need to describe how that's bogus.
Blame Call of Chthulu and it's insistence on making the PCs efforts hopeless and then they die without ever figuring out anything.
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Post by fbmf »

So...is this ever going to get finished?

Game On,
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

doubtful. This is the worst piece of garbage I've ever written, and without booze or anger I can't manage to be funny. I'd rather just let put it out of its misery rather than make it suffer longer.
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Post by Ancient History »

I was gonna do a CoC book next, but I could finish LoM off if people want me to.
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Post by RobbyPants »

Ancient History wrote:I was gonna do a CoC book next, but I could finish LoM off if people want me to.
I'd like that.
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Post by Count Arioch the 28th »

Ancient History wrote:I was gonna do a CoC book next, but I could finish LoM off if people want me to.
Go for it.
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Post by Ancient History »

Chapter 3: The Eye Tyrants

WARNING. The following image shows a graphic depiction of Beholder evolution. Discretion is advised.
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Along with the Mind Flayer and the Rust Monster, the Beholder is one of the most iconic D&D monsters - the kind of thing you could build a product identity around. As such they should be worthy of their own in-depth look at their history, culture, and society. Unfortunately, what you get instead is a rip-off of Dragon Magazine monstrous ecology article.

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Does anyone else remember this book?

Seriously, if you read the fine print in the beginning of this thing the two Beholder-related resources it mentions are I, Tyrant and Michael Mearls' "Eye Wares: Potent Powers of the Beholders" from Dragon Magazine #313. They don't even give a shout-out to Monster Mythology.

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...perhaps it's for the best.

Long story short: they're insane (no, really, it's in the book: every beholder is nuts because the left brain and right brain are actually warring for dominance), giant (8-10' in diameter) hermaphroditic floating orbs with multiple magic eyes and giant fang-filled mouths. They eat, shit, and give birth through their mouths.
Beholders are gender neutral, and they become fertile only once in their lives. During this period (which happens within the first forty years of a beholder’s life), the creature grows increasingly more erratic and paranoid in behavior. A strange ovoid organ (6) below the back of the creature’s tongue grows large and swollen; this is the creature’s womb. A typical beholder gestates up to twelve young in its womb over a period of nearly six months, during which time it grows more and more active and cantankerous. A pregnant beholder eats nearly four times its normal amount of food for the first four months of its term, storing up food reserves in its stomach, intestines, and even its lung. During the final two months, the creature’s womb has swollen so large that its mouth becomes incapable of swallowing more food, and its tongue protrudes grossly from
its maw. A beholder is at its most paranoid during this time and remains hidden in its lair until it gives birth.

The birthing of new beholders is a sight that few have witnessed, and by all accounts, it’s something that even fewer would want to witness. When a brood comes to term, a beholder’s jaw unhinges, and it regurgitates its womb out through the mouth. The creature bites the womb off, and it floats gently in the air. The young beholders are forced to chew their way out of the gory mass to freedom; they are capable of flight immediately, but their eye powers develop later in life.

Although a beholder gives birth to up to a dozen young at once, only a handful survive. The parent observes its young and decides which look most like itself. The others are eaten by the ravenous parent, along with the discarded womb, and the surviving young are forced from the parent’s lair within the hour to fend for themselves.
Ah, the miracle of life.
Anyway, the best part of the Beholder ecology and culture was actually developed in the Forgotten Realms. To whit: there are a bunch of different type of Eye Tyrants, and they are all genocidally opposed to one another. Even slight differences cause them to try to exterminate each other, with only special wonky bullshit like Hive Mothers from the Spelljammer setting able to produce anything like cooperation between beholderkin.

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But can't you see, I'm half-white and he's half-black!

I actually think the Monster Ecology article route is a fairly solid one for this sort of product - well, better than what the others managed to cobble together, anyway - although I sort of wish they're written a completely new one with something like the Monster Hunter's Association* rather than stealing shit outright. As it is, you get a very truncated look at the major beholder variants, such as the massive Elder Orbs, Hive Mothers, Death Tyrants, and various Beholderkin. Also, they switch from in-character description to out-of-character mechanics and references to Monsters of Faerun with no warning whatsoever, because fuck you.

* Monster Hunters Association was a long-running series of Monster Ecology articles/fiction from the late AD&D2 era starring the bumbling cast of the MHA, which was divided between well meaning proto-zoologists/researchers and aggressive, greedy self-declared hunters more interested in what a monster corpse could yield. It was all in good fun, and is missed.

Seriously, after several pages of under-the-tongue wombs and descriptions about the hardness of a beholder's skull, the description of the interesting beholderkin is covered in less wordcount than the section on the beholder diet. That's just bad form. The chapter then merrily skips along to re-present the Beholder Mage class, slightly revised for D&D3.5.

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Now here's the thing about the normal beholder: it has ten eyestalks, each of which has a magical ray-power associated with it, and the central eye shines an antimagic cone which is basically "fuck you, adeventurers." The Beholder Mage, on the other hand, has learned to channel arcane magic through its eyestalks by putting out the central eye. So the entire point of the Beholder Mage is to give this floating death the powers of an archmage. It was a big thing among the select group that cared about this shit back in the day, because a beholder mage even became Magister once (fuck you very much, Mr. Greenwood.) But the point is that the Beholder Mage was originally presented as the only way for an Eye Tyrant to cast magic spells instead of eye rays, because they had no hands to do somantic or material components.

This prestige class is, then, somewhat diminished in D&D3 because on the very same fucking page they have an example character Elder Orb that's also a 16th level sorcerer. I don't know how the fuck that's supposed to work, because while it has the Eschew Materials it doesn't have Still Spell or anything and some of its known spells require Focus and Somatic components - what the fuck is it supposed to do, wave its eye-stalks and make faces?

Anyway, the Beholder Mage prestige class is still insane. Nominally only open to "true beholders," that's a very low bar for most PCs to get around if they want to. It's a ten level prestige class where you gain a new spell level about every level, basically making sorcerers cry all the while. It easily features as one of the most broken classes in the game, and that's saying something.

After this we get a few beholder feats (also open to beholderkin, and sometimes just having appropriate monstrous characteristics). There's a couple things here that are interesting, but so specific that there's not much call for them: Disintegration Finesse lets you use disintegration on the "fine" setting, so that you can lower damage, select which parts of the target to disintegrate, use it to carve, etc. Not a lot of call for that, really. Skilled Telekinetic lets the user with Telekinesis (Su) trigger a command word, spell completion, or spell trigger magic item, which is a great trick when you want to read a scroll in the bad guy's pouch. There's a two-step feat chain that culminates in Disjunction Ray, letting a beholder use Mordenkainen's disjunction.
Beholders avoid using this narrowed ray on magic items since the destruction of a magic item also destroys a potential source of magic that could be used to charge their dweomer-lobes.
Right! Dweomer-lobes. Totally forgot about those. Yeah, although completely uncredited, they ripped off a lot of the beholder anatomy from Ed Greenwood, who reasoned that the reason beholders cached magic goodies they couldn't use is because they fed off the magic. This doesn't make a lot of sense, but any use of the word "dweomer" is a dead giveaway that he's had a hand in it somewhere.

The Metaray feat requires a bit of background. One of the hallmarks of D&D3 were metamagic feats. Before this, many players and designers recognized a desire for metamagic (if nothing else, to cut down on the "greater" and "lesser" spells) but had a very difficult time on implementation in AD&D - there were metamagic spells, and various magic items, and the Language of Magic from the College of Wizardry supplement which strongly influenced D&D3, and of course Ed Greenwood's weird Incantatrix nonsense. But whereas the initial spate of metamagic feats in the Player's Handbook are pretty well together, the game kind of ran into an issue with applying them to spell-like and supernatural abilities in the Monster Manual. Now obviously they wanted to do this, but the basic trade-off of higher spell slots in exchange for greater utility wasn't feasible when applied to a monster that didn't use spell slots. No-one was really happy with the result, which is why they kept having other goes at it - like the Metashadow feats in Tome of Magic - and like the Metaray feat here.

So basically, the Metaray feat allows a beholder or beholderkin to apply a metamagic feat it knows to one of its eye-rays once a round, at the cost of burning out that eye ray for a number of rounds equal to the increase in spell level. That's not bad as far as these things go; it's more of a trade-off than your straight Empower Spell-Like Ability, and there are some interesting things you can possibly do with it when you use stuff like Energy Substitution or Fell Animate (beholder necromancers for the win!) However, it requires taking at least two feats (a metamagic feat and Metaray) and is kind of wasted on the floating ball of death, which is already generally considered deadly enough. As a trick it's interesting, but how many beholder villains do you get in a campaign? It's not like PC beholders are going to be common, either. I'd love to have somebody run an Eyeball Beholderkin PC, but their eyestalk abilities are so weak that I'm afraid Metaray would be quite useless.

The next subsection is Beholder Magic, by which they mean beholder magic items, by which they mean Mike Mearls' version of magic items combined with some stuff Ed Greenwood came up with like the mouthpick.

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Because sometimes a giant floating orb of death wants to hold a sword in its jaws and stab you to death.

The major benefit of this section is making clear what magic item slots a giant floating orb has, as the bulk of the magic items are various "lenses" that are essentially metamagic items for eyerays. This makes me sad, because I'd kind of like to see the magic items made from beholders, like that floating hollowed-up beholder used as a vehicle by gnomes.

Now, finally, we get to Beholder Society. I don't know why it's here, after the game mechanics. It doesn't cover much; they worship the Great Mother, speak Common but have their own language, don't often befriend each other, hate anything they can't eat or zap, and are pretty much genocidal toward each other. There's a lengthy column on the rare Sane Beholders, which makes me sad because it really would have been better replaced with more than the paltry paragraphs the beholderkin got.

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For reasons unknown, the "Sane Beholders" column really spends 9/10 of its time talking about Beholder Cults. These are, you guessed it, cults of humans or humanoids that worship beholders. Because why not?

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Seems legit.

Unfortunately, this doesn't include the Sphere Minion.

Beholders have cities, mainly in Spelljammer and the Forgotten Realms because everyone else realized that jamming a bunch of high-CR apex predators that want to kill everything that doesn't look like them (including each other!) into a small space is a Bad Idea. Seriously, when are you ever going to visit a beholder hive? Never. You're never going to do that. It's like infiltrating an Illithid city, you're just never going to fuck about with that while you have other options. Beholder hives are high-grade mind caulk for gamemasters and game designers.

Despite the name "city," what this basically amounts to is one hive mother and about 50-80 assorted beholders and beholderkin, with a little over twice that number of slaves. I'm pretty sure Ed Greenwood has bigger ones, but the Forgotten Realms as we knew it is long gone anyway so no-one cares.

There's a sidebar (well, bottom-bar) on page 49 asking "Why don't the beholder disintegrate the world?" There really isn't a good answer to that, but according to Mearls it's because otherwise they wouldn't have any challenge in their life.

About a page is spent on minions of beholders, mostly kept around using their charm eyestalks. I guess that's as good a way as any to become a boss monster, but it's about up there with interspecies beholder erotica as far as general utility.

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His name is Bob. His girlfriend is a goblin.

Then we get the lair of a typical beholder, Sekarvu. This is a bit like including an example dragon cave, in that this is basically a short high-level dungeon crawl all on its lonesome. It's a collection of natural caverns connected by disintegrate-bored holes you pretty much need to be a giant floating eyeball to navigate easily, so it's not exactly inviting if the PCs just run across it - break out the ropes and crampons, kids! - and I'm not entirely sure why it needs a lair per se, but as these things go it's not bad. I don't normally see the need to drop a mini-dungeon for 15th level adventurers into the game, but if I did this wouldn't be a poor choice.

Following this is another encounter set-piece, the Cult of the Hungry Eye - yes, a beholder cult - which has a chapel and stables and everything, though no actual beholder in residence, just the head cultist, a drow bard 6/fighter 2/ocular adept 4. Ocular Adepts are a new prestige class introduced in the back of the book, although I don't know why since they'd make much more fucking sense in this chapter with all the beholder-stuff, but then I didn't write the fucking thing.

Next up: The Mindflayers!
Surgo
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Post by Surgo »

Holy shit, it's even worse than I remembered.

I bet I'll say that same thing if I go back to revisit any 3.5 book.
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