Beholders

[Hogan Van Monsterband]

So, in a couple of days I'm running my homage-to-Cloverfield game, wherein the PCs are trapped in a village on an island while some kind of freaky Lovecraftian monster trashes the place. What I've got in mind is a beholder, aided by some kind of deluded mortal cult. Now, I'm aware that this doesn't quite fit the gothic atmosphere of Ravenloft, so I've got two questions:

1) What are some ways I can goth-ify this basic outline? At the moment, it's more up the Call of Cthulhu end of things.

2) I need some ludicrously elaborate titles for the beholder which hint at what it is without giving it away. At the moment, I'm thinking The Eye That Devours, but I'd like some more names. Anyone got any suggestions?

[Band2]

You could try using the moon as a metaphor for the beholder. It is a sphere. And could be taken for the eye of some great beast that needs to be awaken by the cult. Its phases could be liken to the eye slowly opening.
If so, how about these titles "Sight in the Darkness" "Night's Eye" "Silver Night"

[A G Thing]

Well I have to ask is there anything super special about this beholder... You describe Lovecraftian and Cloverfield so I am picturing a giant beholder with some other monsters perhaps clinging to it. Also figuring the monsters magical abilities it has some options there as well depending on what the eyes can do or if you give it further things. The floating makes it near a floating land mass if you do make it Giant so there is something else to play upon.

---If it is Giant than the size can be played up...

The Eye of the World, The Devouring Moon, The Eclipse of the Flesh... Etc

---If it has other monsters attached to it you may start using legion, plague or mother/father references.

The Titan Mother/Father, Blight of the Weeping Sky, The Silent Legion, The Hewn God... Etc

---If you target the magic then it does depend upon the effects of the rays and even the antimagic cone, for sure. From here you just need to avoid using reference to the eye if you can.

Herald of the Burning Pillar, The World Tearer, Judge of the Stone, Defier of the Grand Arcana... Etc

---As for the Hover well it will be silent but also very eerie as the creature passes, and perhaps it will appear slow because of its mass. Some of the above reference this quality already but this may work.

The Void in the Sky, The God Cloud, The Keeper of the Sun and Shade, The Silent Shadow of the World... Etc

Just a couple I came up with... The more detail you give me the more I may be able to add.

Hope it helped!!!

[Intrepid]

maybe you could change the beholder from a standard member of its race into something a bit more lovecraftian.

Maybe it is massive (much like the cloverfield monster) but the eyestalks are more like individual tentacles that can attack the party from out of the mists...

[Rotipher of the FoS]

You could use beholder stats, but change the creature's appearance completely. Perhaps it was assembled by a mad scientist or crazy necromancer -- or heck, two of them working together! -- out of bits and pieces of various monsters, each one of which has one of a beholder's powers. Imagine the PCs as they confront some godsawful biological mash-up, plainly held together by sutures and staples, and they realize that among its umpteen missmatched appendages is a medusa's head, that's just starting to swivel round to face them....

[Lovecraftforever]

Open Grave has an undead Beholder you could use.

What if, a Darklord (Azalin comes to mind ) opened a portal trying to escape the realm, but the Beholder comes through?

[cure]

The (All) Consuming Sight

[Zettaijin]

Rotipher got me thinking about unusual Beholders. While the patchwork monstrous golem idea isn't bad, how about we find less radical concepts that keep the beholder itself fairly intact, but replaces certain key features which we've come to accept as standard in our favourite floating eyels of doom.

Here are a few...

A beholder which has lost its ability to levitate, and is thus forced to use creatures of some kind to move about. Obviously aware of the limitations of having to rely on a cortage of hapless inferior beings as means of locomotion, the creature has managed to fuse various humanoid (and perhaps non-humanoid) creatures into a grotesque carriage or sedan chair of flesh. The bodies are obviously still "alive" somehow, possibly kept this way through magical means, albeit muted for the beholder's sake.

The idea of cultists, bodies warped and twisted into unnatural contortions and positions, some of them fused in a grisly fashion that the tyrannical eye might find amusing, is likely to cause quite a stir in anyone forced to gaze upon it.

---

A blinded beholder devoted itself to harnessing the power of its dark, alien thoughts into dangerously potent psionic skills. Able to control minds and move objects with a mere thought, it hides within the secret bowels of a long abandonned church, modified to suit its purposes.

A feverish cult of half-brainwashed slaves lavish it with gifts, sacrifices, and the adulation it craves.

Anyone foolish enough to confront it run the risk of falling prey to undetectable traps, and a terrifying laughter that continuously mocks their effort from within the deepest recesses of their mind.

---

"'As I approched the one eyed idol, a garish construct of precious metals, some gleaming and some dulled, with but a single gemstone for its eye, a hundred thieves ambushed me, stabbing me to death... Their names all so familiar to me that I could recite them by heart like a poem...'

'As I lay beside my lover, her hair gently fell to cover her right eye, while her left stayed ominously open; an unblinking, unwavering milkish orb ready to swallow me whole while I counted the strands of hair on her head and the pattern it formed on her dusky skin...'

'As I sat in class, a classmate was counting the numbers to one hundred for the benefit of the other children, but I could not help but stare out the window into a inky black void accompanying an eclipse. The gnarly branches illuminated by a single street lamp took on the form of mysterious sigils in my mind...'

'As I picked up the ants crawling on the man's face - a hundred in all if I recall correctly - a haunting thought came to me: his mouth, open wide as it was, reminded me of a nightmare I once had... And then the ants spoke to me in a secret language, using their tiny little black bodies to draw with the man's flesh as canvas...'

My professional opinion is that this is either the first signs of an impending doom for us all or an elaborate hoax... Or perhaps both..." - Albert De Tanville, would-be specialist on matters of the mind and mental health on the collected thoughts of a deranged man thought to have flayed and killed numerous victims all over the northern lands.

Imagine a beholder created out of the shadowy primordial soup of the Nightmare Lands, product of a stranded planar wizard's dreams as his body gradually gave way to that of a transpossessed demon.

The nightmarish beast, aware of the demon's entry through the man whose dreams he haunted, wishes to break free of its enslavement at the hands of the Nightmare Court and enter the world of the waking once and for all using a similar method to the one used by the fiend.

It now haunts the dreams of madmen and murderers, pushing them to construct a proper vessel for its arrival. A hundred men and women will die following agonizing torture and have a portion of their skin carefully sliced according to a seemingly random pattern. Upon the flesh, a single rune is branded in a ritualistic manner and then cured into a tough hide.
The vital organs of the victims will be harvested as well, along with their left eye.

The vile men race to complete their bloody endeavour, with constant dreams of their one eyed master's arrival urging them onward. Once their duty completed, they will gather the scattered fragments into a single whole, ready to welcome a living nightmare.

[RShini]

Anyone else thought of the Unseeing Eye cult from Baldur's Gate 2?

Change a few details and it's a lovecraftian cult.

[Zettaijin]

"Once upon a time, a monster came to us all.
Boasting of its fearsome power, and the mayhem that would befall.

Five men wide and just as tall.
Had more eyes than any sane man would dare recall.

With a maw wide enough to swallow a child whole (possibly more).
It thought itself to be the equal of any mage of lore.

The Lord of the Dead was not amused.
It was asked to leave, yet it refused.

Ten would fall before the monstrous sphere.
Enough that even the dead cowered in fear.

An eyeless mage was summoned before the King,
A perfect foil for the vicious thing.

His was a powerful voice.
Stopping it with a choice.

Serve the Lord of the Dead
Or be forever cursed instead.

The creature merely laughed
So the mage showed his craft

'A many eyed tyrant you were, a one eyed tyrant you will now be...
All of your power will soon fade into a vague memory...
Limbless horror from the unknown...
Now a familiar form you will own...'

Nevermore would the creature bother the land.
Forced to conquer the world with a sword in hand."

Dubious poetry by an unnamed bard presumed undead by now

Only a fool would dare challenge death in its own Kingdom, and perhaps the magics that caused its arrival are to blame, whatever the case may be, one day a beholder came to the Kargat with hopes of taking over.

Taking over what? No one really knows, possibly because no one in the Darkonian secret police had any intentions of ever engaging in diplomacy with such a dangerous and untrustworthy creature.

However, it was a powerful monster, exiled by even more powerful forces from its homeland to the Demiplace of Dread. It took the lives (or unlives) of numerous agents until Azalin intervened by sending in a special agent: a Darkling whose body is now an empty husk and conduit for foul mystical energies and curses.

The mage used a curse sealed with an encantion meant to polymorph the beholder into the much more benign form of a human.

He's still a tyrant, however, heading a band of vicious criminals whom he rules as king. Rumours abound about his cruelty, but also about his forays into magic. Turned into a powerfully built man, towering above everyone and anyone, and with a missing right eye to remind him of his former nature, he took the route of brutality at first, yet now yearns for his old form and powers.

He is currently on the verge of a major breakthrough after raiding the abode of a reclusive mage residing on the outskirts of Tepest, and finding some ancient manuscript that might undo the curse or at least the spell.

At times, eyes appear at the tip of his fingers, allowing him to use some of his eyestalks's powers, not without some effort however.

But now, on moonless nights, he dreams of the eyeless darkling mage. Some of his cronies have spread the rumour that he will run naked through the woods in search of human prey, leaving nothing but a torso with a gaping hole between the stomach and the chest. The stories have grown to such proportions that they also believe that their fellow bandits who have left his employ are actually secret victims of his madness.

[Sareau]

In the Forgotten Realms, they have ghost beholders that are more fitting to the Lovecraftian style, and their spelllike powers are slightly different, enough so you could rely on description of a spectral mist to stymie the party and zap them with odd effects...

[DocBeard]

Beholders always remind me of fantasy Daleks, personally.

[Sareau]

Beholders are round, not pepperpot shaped?????

[cure]

Persumably the likeness concerns the matter of a death ray coming from an eye.

[DocBeard]

They hate everything that isn't a beholder, they are surprisingly clever for psychotic murder monsters, and, yes, laser eyes.

Also I had a villain who was going to be revealed to have created the beholders in an attempt to breed living weapons to win the Dawn War. Shame that game fell through.