Gazer Tyrant and Gazer Kin II

Also called ultimate tyrants, hive mothers are twice a normal tyrant's size. Lacking stalks, they keep their magical eyes under hoods of flesh where they cannot be severed, and their central eye holds 15 hp.

A natural 20 lets the huge mouth swallow a man-sized foe for 5d4 damage per round, but the gullet is shallow, and one successful attack roll frees him.

Their real power is command. A hive mother telepathically directs 5-10 normal gazer tyrants or 5-20 gazer kin and abominations, and one that settles down to nest can build an entire community of them, a calamity for the whole region. Kill it and the colony falls apart, its members fighting each other or scattering to their own lairs. Their origin, ancestor, evolution, mutation or separate species, is unknown.

Directors are social warrior gazers that breed their own mounts and mindlink with them for control. Each has a reduced central eye, six small eyes on retractable stalks, a fanged mouth and three clawed sensory tendrils underneath that grip the mount and connect to its dim mind. The central eye deflects: frontal attacks suffer -2 to hit and deal half damage, and the director gets +2 on saves against spells from anyone in that eye's view.

A director has 8 HD and AC 4, improving to AC 2 when mounted, and keeps all its powers in the saddle within the usual gazer targeting arcs. Rider and mount fight as one creature with their Hit Dice combined. Once the pair has lost half its hit points, the mount moves at half speed and the director is limited to a single physical attack each round. A director may desert its mount, which then fights at -4.

The usual mount, the crawler, looks like a spider bred with a centipede: 4 HD, ten legs, two pairs of antennae, slicing mandibles, and two fangs that stab separately for 2d4 each and paralyze for 1d4 rounds on a failed save vs. poison. Riderless, it can curl into an AC 0 ball.

A 4-foot sphere with no central eye, the examiner has four small eyes on antennae up top and a little lamprey mouth below, ringed by four jointed limbs with gripping pads. Those limbs are its strength: examiners use any tool or artifact as well as a human, up to four at once. They serve as scholars and clerks who research, improve and craft spells and magic items, and their eye effects work at 8th level. They regenerate 1 hp per round. Timid but dangerous with artifacts, they often serve tyrants, overseers and hive mothers.

This semi-mindless drone has a soft, hairy, five-limbed starfish body with a single chest eye above a leering, toothy mouth. Four limbs end in clawed hands with three fingers and two thumbs, and the fifth is a whiplike tentacle. Lensmen alone among the kin wear anything, a harness of webbing for tools and weapons, and they favor double-headed pole arms. Each lensman's eye has just one of six powers, used at 6th level.

An overseer looks like a fleshy tree on a rootlike base, inching along rather than levitating. Thirteen limbs end in eye-buds, one forming the top spine ringed by three babbling mouths, and eight thorny vines grab tools or strike for 1d10+2 each. A fungus coats it in colors of its choosing, usually mottled green, gray and brown. Its eyes work at 14th level, it can use weapons and artifacts, and its body is AC 2 while each AC 7 eyestalk falls off after 10 damage. Like hive mothers, overseers persuade kin to cooperate. Always cautious, each keeps one or two tyrant bodyguards and at least six directors.

A 6-foot sphere with three huge, lidless main eyes around its middle and a compound eye plus six eye spots on top, a watcher is very hard to surprise. Behind its small, rasping mouth hangs a barbed tentacle that hits for 3d6 and shocks: fail a system shock roll and fall unconscious. The compound eye grants message, suggestion and tongues, and each main eye has a pair of powers. These carrion-eating spies are the most cowardly gazers, favoring trickery and flight.

Gazer stock mutates easily. Gazer mages blind their own central eye to cast spells, channeling them through a stalk in place of its normal power, and are shunned for it. Elder gazers are ancient, near-godlike tyrants with fewer working stalks, more hit points and spellcasting, said to create and command deathgaze tyrants. Others include the pale orbus; the doomsphere, a ghost gazer born of magical explosions; the kasharin, an undead that spreads the rot that killed it; the eyeless, boulderlike astereater; and the gorbel, a wild, clawed, magicless kin that explodes when attacked. Some normal-looking tyrants have odd eye powers, such as detect lie in place of a death ray, and are outcasts to all their kind.