Planar Gazer [Gazer Kin]

Planar gazers are 6 to 7-foot spheres of mottled purple and pink chitin up to 3 inches thick. Three main eyes are spaced around the middle, three mouths around the lower half, and six small eyes on stalks crown the top. Innate levitation holds them aloft. Visitors from the Prime are often startled to find them lairing in the neutral planes and the lawful planes, though a race as widespread as the gazer tyrants was bound to have planar relatives.

Behind the shell lurks an alien mind and fearsome magic, yet unlike their greedy prime cousins, planar gazers are calmly neutral and fight only when attacked directly, preferring bargaining and manipulation. Anyone who mistakes one for a gazer tyrant and attacks still regrets it.

The body is AC -2, but the mouths, main eyes and stalks are AC 2 and have their own hit points, separate from the creature's: 15 per mouth, 10 per main eye and 5 per stalk. Each mouth sits on a retractable stalk that reaches 5 feet. A hit that beats the needed roll by 4 or more latches on and drinks 2 hp of blood per round, and it spreads its mouths among as many victims as it can.

Each main eye fires a 100-yard telekinetic ray with one of three uses. It can act like forceful hand, shoving a creature of up to 500 pounds back 20 feet per round, holding one of 500 to 1,000 pounds in place, and slowing anything heavier to 10 feet per round. It can strike a blow for 1d12 plus the victim's AC. Or it can automatically turn aside every missile fired at it within a 120-degree arc facing that eye. Each of the six small eyes produces its own effect against one target. All its eyes see as with true seeing out to 100 yards, minus alignment, so illusions and invisibility do not fool it.

If magic fails or subtlety is needed, it turns to its strong telepathic and psychokinetic powers, and it enjoys testing mental attacks on nonpsionic foes and permanently shattering their minds.

Psychokinesis: science telekinesis; devotions inertial barrier and animate object. Psychometabolism: no sciences; devotions double pain, chameleon power, body control and cause decay. Telepathy: sciences probe, domination and mind link; devotions ESP, contact, mind bar, aversion, attraction, phobia amplification and invisibility. Metapsionics: the psychic surgery science, plus psionic drain and psionic sense as devotions.

Planar gazers loathe each other and avoid their own kind. Open fighting between them is rare but happens, driven by territory and competition for resources rather than the xenophobia of prime tyrants. Each splits its time between keeping its realm in precise order and roaming the planes for the knowledge and power to expand it. Abroad it is fairly passive, even toward travelers carrying things it wants, which is how it earned its old name of observer. At home it shows no patience at all and ruthlessly destroys rivals and trespassers.

It dominates or psionically reshapes every creature in its domain into a slave, so its home is guarded by a host of slaves with blank, rewritten minds. Obsessed with wealth, it keeps them busy growing its hoard. It is not cruel for cruelty's sake, just deeply selfish and paranoid.

Planar gazers sit near the top of any food chain; only the mightiest fiends can beat one. They hoard magic and secrets and can be superb sources of information for anyone willing to bargain, but they give nothing for free. Nobody knows how they breed, though some suspect a parasitic egg planted in a slave. The young eats its host from within, emerges to challenge its parent, and is driven off and ignored thereafter.