Hello and welcome to another spooktacular Ocular October!

This eighth installment of my seasonal stat blocks and supernatural-suffused sentences is a bit special to me, as eight is my favorite number! The tentacles of an octopus, the infinity symbol on its side, there are many ways the number eight has singular symbolism, so I’m going to do something I’ve been considering for some time.

I’m…expanding this blog beyond Beholders! (Gasp, cue audience clutching pearls and fainting dead away.)

There’s a lot more I’ve created and want to create D&D-wise than eye tyrants, after all. But! To avoid getting too carried away for this FIRST experiment (as much as I like getting carried away with experiments, muahahaha!), I’ve decided to focus on an aspect of one of my ongoing campaigns to further flesh out for you here – one that could be used in ANY campaign, and that is at least partially related to beholders.

In the campaign in question, my players are running “urban fantasy detective” characters in a fantasy “megacity” – they go around solving supernatural crimes, essentially. There’s a lot more to it besides that, but unimportant for now – what is important is one of the conspiracies/factions they deal with regularly, and that’s the cultists who follow an ideology called The Beast of a Thousand Parts.

This cult operates in a way that is both fragmented and united, mad and yet terrifyingly organized, and boasts a number of monstrous patrons for each of its sub-cults called “Organs” that guide their cultists in various objectives – the usual theft, murder, kidnapping, ritual sacrifices, and worse – all toward a mysterious (and probably bad for your PCs!) end-goal. This makes it a pretty versatile medium for whatever themes and baddies you want to inject into your game, and thus a pretty good topic for this scariest of seasons I think!

So, enjoy the first installment below (note I have changed some details around and expanded the lore and stats from my home campaign to make it palatable to the public), and look forward to another Ocular October with this fanatical feast for the eyes!