Pictures That Make Monsters Stop Sucking

I drew this thing. Then I realized it's kind like a roper, only not stupid. Now, ropers are still on my list of monsters too dumb to use, but I have to admit, nothing makes me re-evaluate my "do-not-use" list like a good picture.

I'd never use goblins if I thought they looked like these hapless mooks:



So now when there's a goblin I show my players this:



And I feel fine about it.

Here are some other pictures I've found around the internet that rehabilitate lame monsters:



Is that a troglodyte? A draconian? Either way, it's not stupid anymore. Thanks Keith Parkinson!


No matter how hard they try, TSR and WOTC treants all look like log-bumpkin hybrids about to yell "Get off my lawn!". Ian Miller, on the other hand, knows that trees don't care about you at all.


It takes a seriously awesome picture to make a snob like me want to stat up a demon rooster.



Blindheim, anyone?

This kind doesn't shoot eyerays at you. You just look at it and it's so fucked you go blind.

Continuing on the fiend folio theme...when I saw this able but uninspiring image of the kenku...


...I thought--"Does this game really need budgie men? Does any game need budgie men? Do humans, as a species, even need the concept of budgie men running around in our collective consciousness? What are we, as a society, coming to?"

When then I saw this:


I had no idea it was supposed to be the same monster. I also, for some reason, assumed they were like 8 inches tall and roamed Lankhmar stealing shiny objects from unconscious drunks. So I made some up and that's what they do.


However, if the full-size kenku do come around, I'll have them look like this.



Unicorns aren't so bad, I guess, but now I really want to use one--if David Lynch ever makes a movie about a little girl with a unicorn, this is what the poster'll look like.



This is a Bakezori--a kind of Japanese spirit that posesses an ordinary household item--which is a fine idea for a monsters, but who would've thought you could've pulled it off with a sandal? Well, Shigeru Mizuki, for one. He was right, too. Now you are scared of a sandal.

Now it's tough to beat that, but prepare for the ultimate feat of artistic reinvention. Brace yourself...



Behold: a cool bard.

My Cruellest Kill

My girlfriend's sister wanted to learn to play, and she wanted to be a witch. I said alright, roll some dice.

Like most 1st level AD&D wizards, my girlfirend's sister's first character had way more gold pieces than she could spend.

You can't buy armor, you can't buy weapons, so...?

When I last faced a similar problem, I noticed that the cp-sp-gp-whatever conversion rates made it possible to buy a phenomenal amount of beer for, like, 10 gp. So I did. My character was so drunk I didn't name him--I figured he couldn't remember. We called him "The Wizard."

Sis, on the other hand, her eye gravitated toward the "livestock" section.

"I want six pigs--three full size and three piglets."

Hey, it's on the equipment list.

She commenced to name them. She also figured out how to talk to pigs somewhere along the line-I think I was using Fairy Tale Rules for magic-user languages. Wizards willing to forgo Orc or Dragon can talk Pig--why not? There's gotta be some compensation for having the balls to walk around with one hit point.

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So it was one of those "You wake up and you don't know how you got here and you don't know where your stuff is" adventures. (Because I am of the Walter Hill* school of DMing.)

"Are my pigs here?"

"Not in this room."

My girlfriend and her sister are funny. Promise them gp, xp, magic items, present moral dilemmas and opportunites for character growth, this does not motivate them particularly--take away 75 gp worth of stuff they bought during character generation, however, and in every room it's like "Is my stuff here? Did that goblin have my stuff? I cut open the dragon's stomach with my bastard sword--is my stuff in there?".

Too many video games I think. Because, like, in video games, if you lose your stuff, this is the apocalypse.

So anyway, in this dungeon, if you got past the baby black dragon hiding in the halfling vampire queen's coffin, the treasure includes "any equipment lost by first person who asks if their stuff is there."

So Sis asks: "Is my stuff here?"

"Why yes it is."

"And all my pigs?"

"Well, one of them,"

"Which one?"

"I don't know, which one do you want it to be?" (Dig the thorough and meaningful integration of Cooperative Narrativist elements.)

"Charles." (or something)

"Ok, there's Charles, he is very pleased to see you. He bats his big piggy eyelashes. Squeee! Squeeeee!"

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So there were some adventures, and then the party came to a dark stairwell. Who knows what lurks down there?

"Send the pig down," suggests one fo the boys.

"Ok, I send the pig down."

Now--the stairwell is full of undead birds.

Vultures with skull heads. They were inspired by things called "carrion" in Warhammer Fantasy, and there was a really nice one on the back cover of the original Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles #17 by Bryan Talbot. Too tired to google it.

So the predictable thing happened. I narrate thusly:

"....as Charles is borne pitilessly aloft by the unliving raptor he cries 'Oh, why have you betrayed me? I trusted youuuuu....'"

"Awww..." Horrible look on sis's face.

The party moves on, talks to a sphinx, finds out about stuff, etc. etc.

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Play ends.

So then I try to sleep.

I have trouble sleeping.

I keep picturing that pig in those bony claws "Why have you betrayed meeeeee.....?"

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Next game starts.

I say Hey everybody, Settle down kids, and I recap last game then I go:

"...aaaand, ok, everybody if you were here last time you get 308 x/.p., check to see if that levels you up and, also, I made a mistake last time, Sis's pig's last words were not actually 'Oh, why have you betrayed me? I trusted youuuuu....' they were actually "It's ok! I regret nothing! I had a lot of fun I wouldn't have otherwise had if I hadn't gone with you on your adventure! I've had a full life, thank you, goodbye!"





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*Walter Hill:

"I very purposely--more and more so every time I do a script--give characters no back story. The way you find about these characters is by watching what they do, the way they react to stress, the way they react to situations and confrontations. In that way, character is revealed through drama rather than being explained through dialogue." --Walter Hill, quoted in David Thomson's "A Biographical Dictionary of Film" (New York: Alred A Knopf, 1994)

Imaginable Monsters, Sci-Fi Monsters, etc.

Imaginability

So when I posted about the moat dragon, Mathew Slepin wrote this:

This brings up some interesting issues; among them is Player Expectation.

On the one hand, I totally get the idea of using Player Expectation for effect--the "Oh, shit! It's a Beholder!" thing. And clearly there has been decades of expectation now since the game first codified certain monsters.

But on the other hand, the original players had no expectations. They wouldn't know what that eyeball-thing was. And that's how I tend to play--I like to change the monsters enough that you get a general reaction of "Oh shit! What is that thing!". With the consequent expectations only occurring after some experiences.

Anyway, so, yeah, new and totally unexpected monsters are good.

On the other hand, D&D is a game of imagination. You sit around a table and all imagine the same thing. I tend to assume that the more concrete and detailed this shared imagining is, the more fun the game is. And it's easy to imagine something everybody knows, like a minotaur. Ok, team, synchronize imaginations...we're all imaginging a guy with a bull's head? Ok, let's go...

The trick to making new things in fantastic scenarios interesting is, I think, making new things out of parts that are easy for your players to imagine.

The handsnake is a new monster, but it's just a hand--which we all have--and a snake--and we all know what a snake is. This makes it to imagine than, say, that. And, perhaps more importantly, easier to remember than that.

Looking at these two articles about creating "monsters with traction", what surprises me is that they fail to note this--or at least note it enough.

The most successful D&D monsters that don't come from old folklore and myth tend to be ones that, visually, fit the "made-of-identifiable-parts" rule: the beholder (a big floating eye with eyestalks), the mind flayer (a guy with an octopus for a head), the demon princes. (As do most of the monsters that do come from folklore and myth that have traction--the medusa, the couatl, etc.).

The otyugh and the umber hulk and the xorn aren't as popular for a reason. (The even less popular catoblepas and leucrotta, while arguably made of identifiable parts, are harder to convincingly describe--and, more importantly, to consistently picture while playing.) People who remember them tend to be people who grew up with them and so have seen the picture.

That's because the other way to make a new monster imaginable is to make well-known images of them--that's why the githyanki has traction and the githzerai (from the same book but not in full color on the cover) doesn't.


Primal Symbolic Stuff

Making a monster out of eyes or snakes doesn't just make it easy to imagine, on some level, things like eyes and snakes (and wolves and stags and bats and bears) mean something to the human unconscious. They create uncanny semi-recognitions. It's familiar, but wrong which is creepy. In a good way.

It's no coincedence that fantastic monsters work best when they refer to symbols that are psychologically important to people because, the fact is medusas and dragons and cyclopses really did emerge from human psychology.





Fantastic Monsters Vs. Sci-Fi Monsters

Now, all this sounds reasonable, but it all goes out the window in sci-fi where it's a mark of both creativity and "realism" (in the hard-SF sense) to make monsters that don't look like anything we're familiar with.

This is a weird situation for the artist who wants to create something compelling. In sci-fi movies it's no problem--the thing's on the screen where you can see it so the only restriction is the budget. In sci-fi books, the best authors--the Phillip K. Dicks and the Ballards--actually use the undescribability of the aliens to their advantage. It's not really that a Vug or a Vogon is truly indescribable, more that, in literature, there's often little, aesthetically, to be gained from a detailed description.

(Lovecraft--and sci-fi horror in general--is an interesting middle case--we all know he combined sci-fi with the fantastic, but he also combined the emotions associated with them. That is, he explored the primal and recognizable emotion of being horrified by that which is fundamentally unrecognizable. The undescribable is alien, but the fear of that which is alien is not alien.)

In an RPG, despite it not being a visual medium, there is much to be gained from having a creature be describable--whatever it is, players need to know how much space it takes up, how many weapons it can hold, how hard it'd be to knock it over, etc. etc.

This "monster imaginability factor" has had a considerable effect on sci-fi gamers. Consider the most popular sci-fi games:

In Star Trek and Star Wars, the aliens are familiar from the big and little screens.

In Shadowrun and Warhammer 40k, the aliens are, largely, based on familiar fantasy races (eldar are elves, etc.) and in Warhammer 40k, once unfamiliar aliens started being introduced, they always had miniatures made with them to reinforce their visual identities. (The ones that didn't disappeared--Catachan devil? Jokaero?)

Rifts is a mash-up game, so pretty much everything in it was familiar from another source. Even the splugorths are basically Lovecraftian old ones. The original things in Rifts that have any "traction" are backed up by copious illustrations (the glitter boy, for example). Other iconic pieces of Rifts--dog-boys, skelebots, skull-walkers--are all made of identifiable parts.

Traveller was originally a meet-whatever-the-hell-you-can-imagine-in-space game, but the races that were thoroughly catalogued and illustrated by the game's authors quickly came to dominate the game and a continuity got created. These races were mostly familiar looking--wolfpeople, lionpeople, lizardpeople etc.





Bold, Sweeping, Conclusion with Surprisingly Broad Implications


I think, in general, this may be why D&D is still more popular than its sci-fi competitors despite the fact that sci-fi is theoretically always a more hip and groovy and flexible and accessible and popular genre than the fantastic. It's because RPGs are about imagination, and one of the most fundamental ideas in truly good sci-fi is getting to see the totally unimaginable and that fundamental idea is difficult to pull off week after week in a game of imagination, and it is impossible to put in a game book because as soon as you do, the players can imagine it.

On the other hand, the fantastic is about moving toward the primal and the primal is somewhere inside all of us. Either as "basic desires and symbols and what they imply" or as in "stuff that happened a long time ago". A dragon is an inkblot that the human race has been staring at for 300,000 years. Players don't mind the unexpected and the alien in D&D, but they also welcome the chance to confront dragons, because that means something to them already.

In other words, sci-fi is more about the possible, and the fantastic is more about the psychological.* Sci-fi is about what might be out there, the fantastic is about what might be in here. Sci-fi is about the difference between what is and what could be and the fantastic is about the difference between what is and what we think is.

Neither is a more noble or useful pursuit than the other, but there may be reasons (other than the obvious historical one) that the latter genre has survived more totally among the fans of a game of imagination than it has in any other medium. And why it has survived better than any other genre in that medium.



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*This is perhaps why, in the hands of a hack, sci-fi tends toward cold invention-of-the-monthery and, in the hands of a hack, the fantastic tends toward sentimentality and wish-fulfillment.

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Hey bloggers, I got a question--my little skeleton head doesn't pop up in the list of "people following this blog" for othe peoples blogs I'm following, even though they're on my blogroll and on the blog reader for this blog. Like if I go to Monsters and Manuals there's no Zak S under "Followers". Is the idea I have to get a gmail account and subscribe to the blog thru that in order for that to happen? Let me know. If so, just know that's not happening, so even though my head isn't there, I'm probably still reading your blog.

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images: shadow king by Jiri Trnka, spider by Manny Schongut, other pictures by me.

What My Players Are Doing When They're Supposed To Be Listening To My Enthralling Descriptions Of 10' x 10' Rooms

If you click on the picture, you'll see a meticulous list of magic-items the party's acquired. As for the rest...what is that, paladin-playing-guy, a bear wearing paisley? And what's with the bunnies? There are no bunnies in this dungeon.

The "fail" I think refers to the paladin's die rolls. The misspelled "Fale" in the upper left is a reference to "Yale" the artist's alma mater. As for "Don't Shake Me Lucifer" well, we were listening to Roky Erickson. As you do.

This drawing has been censored to spare your delicate sensibilities. Note the flail snail.

Yes, I made them fight a flail snail. This is largely because I am awesome.

The rogue player illustrates her exploits. Left--attempting to seduce the White Elf Amazon guard. Right--dwarf attacking the skin-stealing gremlin after it leaps from the hollowed-out-body of a party guest.

This character sketch was drawn on the back of one of those shiny lid things you get on top of mexican food. By someone with a master's in fine arts.

Somewhere in one of the 666 layers of the Abyss, they are showing this drawing to a 4-armed demon and going "Yeah, man, this is the palooka that natural-20ed you from behind."

Horst Von Chasm--1st level wizard--who survived a slime trap only to be crushed by a giant toad. He might've pulled through if the cleric hadn't decided Hey, he'll probably die anyway, why not test this red potion on him?

Hey look, somebody's mapping. Excellent. Note the "ribbit noises" in the lower right hand corner.

Moat Dragon

This semi-domesticated aquatic offshoot of the black dragons is a product of selective breeding. While their breath weapons, wings, and legs were bred out of them centuries ago (mostly to protect their owners) and they are generally too isolated from their own kind to learn magic, their main appeal is that they grow to enormous and peasant-intimidating size at a ridiculously young age. There are dozens of known strains, and subspecies with unusual features such as venom sacs, goat horns, tentacles, and chameleonlike-skin have all been reported.


The powerful lords who own and trade moat dragons generally house them in palisaded pools or moats far too deep to escape, and have the animals killed when they outgrow their enclosures. On rare occasions, however, they escape or (even rarer) are released into the sea, where they grow bitter, ancient and coarse-scaled in the deep water, develop algae-filled beards and vast, flowing fins like tattered warship sails, and learn strange magics from the cold and cryptic things that sleep far beneath the waves. Such creatures, while no longer "moat" dragons, are so rare as to have no common name, and the few who have seen them, for panicked seconds, can perhaps be forgiven for not taking the time to thoroughly detail the many differences between the ancient moat dragon and the Eastern Sea Dragon or Lung Wang.
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Design notes:

So this monster addresses two "problems":

(1)--There are dragons in moats in medieval art and stories, but not in the game,

and

(2)--If it's Dungeons and Dragons then low-level players may well wonder when they get to fight a dragon. And not some little not-quite-a-real-dragon like a five-foot-long wyrmling or a pseudo-dragon. So the moat dragon is a full-size, honest-to-god dragon that low-level PCs might actually have a chance with. However, it's visually different enough from standard dragons that it won't spoil the reveal when the serious villainous reptiles show up.


Now, as it says in this article:

There's a natural tension built into the notion of a monster that you can fight at low, middle, and high levels. On the one hand, scalability adds a sense of continuity. But if every monster is perfectly scalable, players don't get the sense of dread from knowing they're facing a particularly tough monster. Most D&D players shudder the first time a beholder comes floating down the corridor. But if they've been fighting 1 Hit Die beholders from their very first session, the 11 HD version is just another monster.

So, basically, that means I'd take care--when using this monster--to make the PCs realize that a moat dragon is a different and far less sophisticated animal than its land-dwelling cousins (thus the tentacles). Oh, that thing you just killed? That was just a moat dragon--didn't even have any spells.


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Crunch:

Ordinary young moat dragons have as many hit points as they need to have in order to put up a decent fight with your PCs the first time they meet one (and they have whatever armor class, too). Offensively, beyond maybe the occasional drown or gore attack, they do roughly what you think a big sea snake would do.

Ancient moat dragons are some serious arcane mythic Lovecraftian shit and should be statted accordingly.

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Images: Photo from Claire Nouvian's (rad) book The Deep, the Tom Waits -looking dragon painting's by Piero di Cosimo, the hit location sketch is by me, and the etching is by somebody who's dead and will probably be ok if I don't credit him.

What Is This Game?

My general feeling about games is--play whatever system, and hack the hell out of it to fit your--and your players'--taste.

However, when you ask someone if they want to play D&D with you, they kind of expect certain things, and if you change those things, you should tell them first. Also, when and if you complain about D&D, you really can only complain about certain things, since the rest are easy to change.

Here's my list of core things that define the game* for my players and/or are complicated to change:

1-Characters have races and classes (or race-as-class)
2-The classes include (at least) fighters/warriors, magic-users/wizards, thieves/rogues, and clerics/priests. Fighters can use any weapon or armor and are good at it, wizards use magic, clerics use magic and can fight ok, thieves have sneaking abilities.
3-Characters get experience points and go up in levels
4-PCs have 6 ability scores (Dex, Str, etc.) and they're mostly on a scale from three to eighteen
5-There's a list of spells and, when the PCs use them, they generally do what it says in the book--especially the ones low-level players get (like magic missile)
6-It's set in a version of medieval europe and the player races are derived from european folklore and include--at least--the major races in the Lord of the Rings books.

7-Characters and monsters have an "armor class" that combines size, armor, and dexterity
8-Physical damage is recorded as hit points
9-In order to attack, you make a "to hit" roll on a d20 versus ac (including dex, str, and other bonuses)
10-Going up in levels increases your hit points

These are the parts of the bike that, if you change them, it'll make people start thinking it's not the same bike. Change more than half, and it's not D&D any more. Which is fine, but you might want to ask your players if they mind. These are merely the assumed defaults.

(I should stress that although I think this list is pretty exhaustive for my players your mileage may vary--some people you know may squeak if they find out you're playing fast and loose with, say, alignment.

If you feel there are any "core" things that would have to be added to this list to describe your players' idea of the game, let me know in the comments.)

(Looking at the comment below from Carl, I guess I should also stress that nobody I know particularly cares if we suddenly aren't playing D&D anymore. They just like to be told first.)

Pretty much anything else about the game other than those 10 I know I can hack and my players either won't care or won't notice or will not bat an eye when I tell them I'm changing it.

So, a list of things that are not-the-core of D&D would include: what you get xp awards for, magic items (effects and distribution), alignment, deities, fire damage, trap disarmament procedures, time scale, encumbrance, which weapons do what damage, how hard it is to perform noncombat operations, what happens when you get to 0 h.p., running, jumping, climbing, spotting, hearing noise, initiative prcedures, character movement speed, how wizards learn spells, what exactly you can see with infravision, monsters used, whether you are actually ever in a "dungeon", system shock survival, rules for henchmen, assasination, character interaction, light sources, diseases, tracking rules, the precise ranges and durations of monsters' spells and spell-like abilities, how long it takes to cast a spell, rules for grappling or grabbing or unarmed combat, whether there are planes of existence, and everything else in the DMG or players handbook or anywhere else in the published game.

So: D&D as a mental construct in player's heads consists largely of a combat system, a (partial) spell list, a character generation & advancement system, and a vaguely-defined setting. The rest gets regularly hacked all the time, often by DMs who don't even know they're hacking it.

If anyone complains about D&D and is complaining about anything other than one of these 10 concepts, then you'd just ask "Well why not just house-rule it?"

"The casting time rules are confusing!" Well change them, waterhead, glue-sniffing 8th graders have been figuring out how to do it since 1979. The same goes for the retroclones.

Some things I notice when I make this list:

>I--like many gamers, and nearly all game designers in history--am often sorely tempted to hack items 7-10 (over a third of what makes D&D truly D&D), and I don't because I know it'd confuse and consternate my players since they're all pretty casual gamers and it's not really worth it in the end since we all have lots of fun with 7-10 the way they are so whatever.

This guy would--very reasonably--ask "Well why play D&D instead of some other system?". For pretty much the same reasons international diplomats use English. Given the extant state of the universe, it's just the easiest. If, instead of a bunch of thoroughly distracted strippers, porn stars and artists--some of who are just now getting the hang of simple things like writing down on their character sheet how much damage their own weapons do--my players were all hardcore RPG-bloggers, we'd probably all be playing Rolemaster. (Which I would totally be into.) Like I said, until we stop having fun, I'm not fucking with it.

>2, 5, and 6 are often expanded far beyond the limits of the original game design, and it usually works just fine. That is, new classes, spells and setting elements can be bolted on at will and there's very little problem with that. Only taking away stuff that's in these rules will confuse or upset players or have a ripple effect that screws up the rest of the system.

>Hardly anybody ever expresses a desire to change 3 or 4 unless they're making a whole new game. They're fairly robust concepts and pretty much work well enough, even intelligence and wisdom being two different stats. Charisma gets a bad rap and in one version there was Charisma AND Comeliness, but eventually it got changed back. I personally like Charisma alone since it says, in effect: "17 Charisma? Maybe your character is charming, maybe your character is hot, maybe a little of both--defining which is up to you, the point is this character has this much ability to influence others. Envisioning the character is the player's prerogative, defining his or her effectiveness is the dice's prerogative."

>None of these core, defining rules are incompatible with bolting on mechanics that encourage role-playing or storytelling if that's the game you want, with the occasional and very very narrow exception of rules 8, 9, and 10 since they sort of abstract what happens in combat and so make saying, for example, "he lost an eye at the Battle of Scuffleheim" difficult.

(In my own games, I throw in a hit-location system, but I warn everybody.)

Semi-Related Stuff:

If you go here and listen to "meta-episodes" 1, 2, 3 and (more recently posted) 4 of this podcast you'll hear a really interesting discussion about combining D&D mechanics with the mechanics of new school games. I should note here that these people play their game in a way I probably never would--waaaay too emohippiegamey for me and my players (plus it's 4e)--but I feel like it is one of the most intelligent and least condescending discussions of what D&D can and can't do by storygame-friendly gamers. I don't agree with everything they say, but I do appreciate the fact that they discuss the issue without the "D&D is primitive and now we're beyond that" mindset that some storygamers seem to have.

(In general, I like that podcast--I have no desire to run that adventure or play the way they do, but I like hearing how other people can play vastly different games than I do and still have fun, plus it's extremely professional and well-put-together--plus when they get drunk it seems like all their "planned character development" goes out the window and they're just trying to kill things and have fun.)

For a different--equally interesting, if shorter--point of view and one with which, I largely happen to agree, see this. The same example (coincedentally?) comes up in both podcasts--the example of "role-playing a game of Clue"



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*Obviously this list leaves out philosophically "outside the box" defining features like "in the game, you pretend to be a person that is not yourself and you pretend to exist in another world yet you do not actvely believe this or imagine anyone else to believe this". I'm just talking about things that define D&D against other pen & paper RPGs.

Eye of Dread

The Eye of Dread--the unnatural union of a thief's hand, a snake's body, and the eye of either a blind child or a lunatic--is a kind of evil humunculus created by witches of the northern wastes, who employ them to spy on their foes and, occasionally, to suffocate them in their sleep.

The eye set into the withered palm acts as both a scrying device and a weapon. If the creature was made using a blind eye, then anyone gazing into the eye must save or be blinded for 1-4 rounds. If the creature was made using a maniac's eye then the victim must save or roll on the Insanities That Are Actually Interesting In Combat Table (the effect will last 1-4 rounds).

Insanities That Are Actually Interesting In Combat Table

1-Target becomes a kleptomaniac
2-Target PC does exactly the opposite of whatever player wants him/her to do
3-Target needs a strong drink before taking any action
4-Target attacks nearest friendly PC
5-Target believes s/he is nearest friendly PC
6-Target is paralysed with indecision
7-Target is confused
8-Target thinks s/he is dead
9-Target thinks s/he is nearest foe
10-Target becomes obsessed with nearby irrelevant object
11-Target moves toward highest point within his/her ordinary move range and jumps off
12-Target drops his/her weapon and begins to cry for help in any and all languages known to him/her

Though posessing a rudimentary intelligence, an Eye of Dread, unlike the handsnake, is little more than a tool of its mistress, and cannot breed.

If slain, the creature turns into a glove. The glove will fit no-one except the witch who sent the Eye, and will fit her in whatever guise she may adopt.
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Crunch:

The Eyes have 1-3 hit dice, and what armor class they have will be due to their small size and relative nimbleness. They grip, poke and choke with an 18 strength.

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Design note:

In movies, you get attacked by werewolves and the next morning you go "Hey, Weird Local--what the hell is going on in this village?" In D&D you get attacked by a werewolf and in the next morning you're just glad it wasn't a weretroll. The Eye may just be weird enough that the PCs might actually investigate it after it tries to kill them.

Also, since, other than the gaze, the Eyes themselves are pretty weak and rely on strangling and grabbing and surprise, I find they, during combat, bring the environment into play a lot more than a basilisk or something--which can just bite you or claw you if its evil eye doesn't work.

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In play:

A few of these, well hidden, turned out to be a serious bargain on the mayhem-per-hit-point exchange. One PC went blind and one thought he was an Eye of Dread. So he sat there and looked evilly at his friends. Meanwhile the eyes were busy choking everyone. Then someone cast darkness. The eyes couldn't see anybody but everyone could feel the Eyes crawling on their faces so the PCs started pounding on themselves in the dark. The eyes who escaped crawled into the light and started attacking the blind guy...

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The mini is from Games Workshop's "Realms of Chaos: The Lost and the Damned".