Dust Up With The Collectors of Eyes At The Keep On The Borderlands From Last Night's Fantastic Heroes & Witchery Actual Play Event

I didn't have a ton of prep time for last night's Warlords of the Outer Worlds game but earlier in the day on a break from work I got a chance to rework a gonzo monster for last night's game. Here's how things went down and there's a Dark Albion angle in here as well.

During last night's adventure we had a full house of players and the action began to heat up as the PC's continued to explore the interior of the former star cult base which is actually one of the side optional dungeons from The Keep On The Borderland . The party is chasing down a wizard whose escaped into the tunnels leading to the Caves of Chaos. So the party settled in for the night into a room where  they thought was safe after fighting the Uaolel-sthugu.

So before this week's foray into the Keep on The Borderlands module I was a little hard pressed for time because of familial medical issues with my dad. So time wasn't on my side and I was sort of forced to come up with a bit of quick setting dressing for this dungeon.  So I quickly pulled out Dark Albion's Cults of Chaos & used it to flesh out certain parts of the map as one reviewer said;"It is a supplement that allows referees and game masters to develop, design, and apply evil cults as antagonists in a campaign. In addition, it addresses in a brief, but not stunted, fashion how to run a campaign where hunting down these vile organizations."  But that's not the only aspect that Cults of Chaos covers; what I needed was a memorable monster or monsters  that was going to keep the players talking for weeks. Earlier in the day I was reading a review and commentary about Judges Guild’s Field Guide to Encounters 

a set of books I happen to own. 




So looking into the Field Guide I took the 'collector of eyes' and used the mutation section of Dark Albion's Cults of Chaos to give a more traditional mythological Russian/Slav treatment for the monster. The collectors of eyes are are victims of Chaos who obsessively collect eyes, count eyes & use eyes. They can also use any special abilities inherit in the eyes such as mutations or magical abilities ie cursing with the 'evil eye'.
They are a form of intelligent undead partially demonic shadow & spirit . These monsters are victims of chaos contamination where cults have been operating for centuries. They are mostly scavengers taking eyes from the living and the dead in the wee hours of the morning and departing with the morning light. Collectors of Eyes are monsters belonging to both the courts of night and darkness. They are often employed by cults of chaos to collect the eyes of certain individuals for black rites and dark spells.


The party held its own against seven collectors of eyes after the bastards cast darkness and the party had to use a ton of team work to deal with the semi demon undead horrors.
The encounter with the collectors of eyes  took up a good portion of the night of play and they delved deeper into the tunnel system. They happened to catch a poster sized map of a nearby monastery from another group of  Gnolls just after they're dust ups with the eye collectors. My point here is that even gonzo monsters with a bit of a make over can be some of the deadliest opponents that players face. This is a dust up that my players will be talking about for weeks to come.
Dark Albion and Cults of Chaos has both a pdf and print run on Lulu. Its a great addition to the arsenals of a DM!