For my world/campaigns, I once changed the vampire's origins. Taking some inspiration from TES, the first vampire was created by the 1st human created, Allin, who descended into evil and became the first dark god. Allin assaulted a woman named Luna, and Luna then became the 1st, pure-blooded vampire, as well as the physical embodiment of Death. Ever since then, pure-blooded vampires are rarely seen/made, but they get a lot more benefits than normal vampires and the number of negative effects they receive is lowered significantly.
all the time. At this point, for me, it is about making them fit into the logic and nature of the setting, rather than just having them there.
my current effort is a terraformed world, in truth, where six limbed critters were the native creatures. So a lot of six limbed critters live in an area that is pretty much designed to be a dead zone in the player facing materials.
so dragons and centaurs and more are all in one area. And all of them have a very different structural nature from the rest of the game world.
I redid the planes, so each has three kinds of beings from different levels. Each of those got tweaked. Devils are corporeal, for example, and feed on flesh, Yada Yada, while Demons are incorporeal and feed on emotions. Ghasts, ghouls are planer critters, and I shifted Vampires into a category alongside Liches and neither are undead.
the main “monsters” all have a basis, and so forth — this is why I have a grand total of 261 “monsters”, with only 200 of them documented in player side materials.
I have a lot of elements, though I have no elemental planes, and the “primary planes” has the layers of Material, Feywild, Astral, and Ethereal, with the other six reflecting some aspect of each of those in their four layers.
About the only things I haven’t really messed with are gelatinous cubes, lol.
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Been contemplating beholderkin without the face and mouth, just floating eyes. Not sure what to do about their bite attack though. A mouth attached to optical nerves?
Been contemplating beholderkin without the face and mouth, just floating eyes. Not sure what to do about their bite attack though. A mouth attached to optical nerves?
Just take out the bite attack. Are the eyes attached by anything like optical nerves, or is it just a bunch of floating eyes?
Maybe instead of the one big mouth it's just a sphere covered in stalks and some of those stalks have eyes on them and some of those stalks have little sharp-toothed mouths.
Or replace every eye that a beholder has with a mouth. A giant many mouthed floating head that has mouths on its eyestalks instead of eyes.
Or replace every eye that a beholder has with an ear. A giant many eared floating head that has ears on its eyestalks instead of eyes. Keep its big mouth, and use it in a quiet place scenario where the characters have to stealth by a blind beholder with a bunch of ear stalks who tries to bite anyone they hear.
Maybe instead of the one big mouth it's just a sphere covered in stalks and some of those stalks have eyes on them and some of those stalks have little sharp-toothed mouths.
Or replace every eye that a beholder has with a mouth. A giant many mouthed floating head that has mouths on its eyestalks instead of eyes.
Or replace every eye that a beholder has with an ear. A giant many eared floating head that has ears on its eyestalks instead of eyes. Keep its big mouth, and use it in a quiet place scenario where the characters have to stealth by a blind beholder with a bunch of ear stalks who tries to bite anyone they hear.
I think I got it: there’s the big eye, then at the end of each stalk is some other sensory organ, which can be an eye, ear, mouth, nostril, or touch receptors. It’s extremely cursed an I love it.
I think the hearing and the smell would be done right through the skin, so really the entire creature is both an ear and a nose. I would imagine there being three kinds of stalks. There's the standard eyestalks with powers like any normal beholder's eyestalks. There's the mouth stalks that can bite. And then there are the grasping stalks which are like long tentacles that can grapple enemies and manipulate objects and such.
As a player I would be sobbing in fear at seeing such a creature. But as a DM I would be giggling with joy.
I think the hearing and the smell would be done right through the skin, so really the entire creature is both an ear and a nose. I would imagine there being three kinds of stalks. There's the standard eyestalks with powers like any normal beholder's eyestalks. There's the mouth stalks that can bite. And then there are the grasping stalks which are like long tentacles that can grapple enemies and manipulate objects and such.
As a player I would be sobbing in fear at seeing such a creature. But as a DM I would be giggling with joy.
Given that Beholderkin are extremely variable in lore, any of these suggestions can be true. And yes, that last part is the intent :).
Speaking of redesigns, though I don’t have any specific ideas, I like the idea of rather than being grotesque, archfiends are every bit as glorious and awe inspiring as they are frightening. I’m imagining a description of a mortal conjurer that came in contact with one, “one eye seeped in terror, the other in joy.” Lesser fiends rarely have this effect because archfiends parasitically drain the “light/life/glory/however to describe it” of their underlings.
Also in my world, wraiths are the undead remains of a vile king or other ruler who continues to rule those around them after they have passed, there subjects being the undead. They can magically control undead, but they usually can't be restored as a king of a living kingdom because of the limitations of death, such as the wasting away of all life around them and the aversion to sunlight. There are also different types of wraiths, like sand wraiths and snow wraiths, which are the spirits of rulers who perished somewhere like in a desert, dune, grave site, or an arctic wasteland and they are bound to that area. They consider the area that they are bound to be their territory and any who die there are cursed to be their subjects and serve their evil masters. However, because they are trapped in a relatively small area, the wraith and their undead minions often spend their times dormant and buried beneath the earth, only rising when their land is disturbed and then they add the intruders to their number.
wraiths, like sand wraiths and snow wraiths, which are the spirits of rulers who perished somewhere like in a desert, dune, grave site, or an arctic wasteland and they are bound to that area.
Wraith of the Lich King, if you will? (A little Wrath of the Lich King World of Warcraft humor)
For one campaign all pre-PC races were prototypes. They were all missing something crucial. Dragons were made before the gods created the full spectrum of emotions. They were amazing in many ways, but their emotional range was very limited, which is why their alignments were so strong.
Giants had a wider range of emotions and they were more diverse but the range of their intelligence was very limited.
Also they never really evolved. They were created for a certain purpose, which was to protect the Prime from invasion. They could have children, but their children were very similar to them in every way.
And they had no souls = no afterlife.
So the mortal races, in all of their physical weakness, were the perfected creation. They were amazingly complicated, evolving, fertile, learning, feeling creatures.
Why? Because in this universe diversity creates diversity. The less diverse the creatures were, the more limited the world itself became. The Mirror World, which was an upside down replica of the "good" universe had become barren and unhospitable because its demon rulers enforced strength and aggression in all of their creation instead of creating diversity. So now they desperately want to conquer the other side because they ruined theirs.
So the Prime gods were chosen because together they had the ability to create life that combined all of the aspects that the universe needed to thrive and win.
Well, in my world the lore for the entirety of the feywild and the dragons is different, so that technically holds all the creatures under that umbrella in the same state.
The feywild in my world is formed of strong opinions. This makes navigation difficult, because if two people look upon a feature in the material plane and form different opinions on it, it may appear differently in the feywild. For example, if a mountain stands between a city of halflings who live on a plain, and a kingdom of dwarves who live in a mountain range, then from the halfling's side, the mountain will be huge, because that's what the halflings think of it. From the dwarfs side, the mountain will be small, because that's their opinion.
As such, differences of opinion will shape the feywild in all sorts of ways!
Well, in my world the lore for the entirety of the feywild and the dragons is different, so that technically holds all the creatures under that umbrella in the same state.
The feywild in my world is formed of strong opinions. This makes navigation difficult, because if two people look upon a feature in the material plane and form different opinions on it, it may appear differently in the feywild. For example, if a mountain stands between a city of halflings who live on a plain, and a kingdom of dwarves who live in a mountain range, then from the halfling's side, the mountain will be huge, because that's what the halflings think of it. From the dwarfs side, the mountain will be small, because that's their opinion.
As such, differences of opinion will shape the feywild in all sorts of ways!
That is a cool idea. For my Faeriewilde (the Feywilde) I went back to Goidelic and Brythonic myths, then mixed in some oddities, heavily influenced by Romance and victorian era input, then tweaked through the use of some more modern (post 1990) interpretations of them.
Let's me use all the little folklore around the Good Folk, and heightens the atmosphere of my horror, mystery, and gaslamp adventures.
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Well some of the dogs from the hamlet attacked the trolls when they saw their owners attacked; the dogs soon became ill and feral and began to rapidly change, diseased by the blood of the troll that that had bitten.
So the monster from Strixhaven - the "Groff" - I changed to be these hunting dogs that had been changed by the infection of the trolls. I'd normally not use anything from Strixhaven (a lot of it is all the "Harry Potter" stuff - but since I had the book I wanted to begin making use of it). So these Groff are the dogs of this hamlet who are now diseased.
Just fun stuff like that.
What's something you've done?
Recently did some cool stuff with Groffs. I changed them to be army dogs that served a spring eladrin. Wherever the eladrin wanted to take over, he would order his Groff army to attack there first. The eladrin is about to take over a city called Camelot (very unoriginal name, I know) so he sent his Groffs out to attack it first. I also made them "Variant Groffs" - wherever they went, all the plants around them would grow more and more until their location was completely overgrown and impossible to travel through. The strongest Groff sent to destroy Camelot took over the city's garden called the Garden of Eden (unoriginal again, I'm bad with location names) and is currently resting in the garden.
Reading the description of shadows gave me the impression that they’re less like undead as we usually think of, but rather the suppressed evil desires and inclinations of the person come to “life”. As such I have it that a shadow can come out of a person who’s still alive under certain circumstances, and will torment their originator with dreams of the havoc the shadow is causing.
For my bestairy, I had to come up with a series of "native beasts" and have been having some fun with it. The foundational requirements are six limbed, with slit nostrils and eyes that have a triple pupil. There are five classes: Sky, Sea, Soil, Sand and Smoke. Each class has to have a complete ecological profile. The Soil herbivores are, well, rather hefty boys.
The Sky was pretty easy, of course. Apex is Dragons. And there are Centaurs.
Of course, the hardest part is that all of them are for maxed characters to deal with.
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Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities .-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-. An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more. Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
So one of the lores I created for my homebrew is that the Azer are actually dwarves whose sparks from the Life Forge exist.
The Life Forge was using the fires from the Plane of Fire and some of the sparks that fell from the Life Forge and landed back in the Plane of Fire are actually the Azer, in the form of fire dwarves. The Azer are good in nature (generally) - and have opened portals to some of the larger Dwarven Kingdoms and do exchanges - they're often employed to smelt adamantine metal - which in my world, is used for armor and weapons - but also highly regarded, because in the Shadow Realm (essentially my version of the Underdark) the way the moisture interacts with adamantine creates water and can spark lightning and create "mini storms" that help water the plants in the Shadow Realm.
Has anyone done anything specific with the Azer in any of your games (either as a DM, or if you interacted them as players)?
So one of the lores I created for my homebrew is that the Azer are actually dwarves whose sparks from the Life Forge exist.
The Life Forge was using the fires from the Plane of Fire and some of the sparks that fell from the Life Forge and landed back in the Plane of Fire are actually the Azer, in the form of fire dwarves. The Azer are good in nature (generally) - and have opened portals to some of the larger Dwarven Kingdoms and do exchanges - they're often employed to smelt adamantine metal - which in my world, is used for armor and weapons - but also highly regarded, because in the Shadow Realm (essentially my version of the Underdark) the way the moisture interacts with adamantine creates water and can spark lightning and create "mini storms" that help water the plants in the Shadow Realm.
Has anyone done anything specific with the Azer in any of your games (either as a DM, or if you interacted them as players)?
I fought a few Azers once, but I really just scared them into submission. I like your Azer idea, and I just realized a fire genasi would make a good Azer. They have +2 constitution like dwarves, and their flame abilities are all great so if a player wanted to play a Azer as a character, playing a reskinned fire genasi seems like it would work.
The Beholder is a monster that was once a deadly encounter; but now, has been seen as a creature that rules where ever it calls itself home.
What's some cool stuff you've done with a Beholder?
For example - in my main D&D game I run - there's a skull that has a special gem imbued in the eye socket - and it was a religious gem tied to the God of Wisdom, who in my world, was killed when the Spider Queen ascended. Now this gem whispers all kinds of secrets uncontrollably - and people gain incredible knowledge... however, most are driven insane, because once they hear the secrets they can't put it down - and it never stops whispering. Ever. So Wizards who picked it up ended up as Allips, for example.
Well, a Beholder has recently got it - and now learned how to ascend into godhood. And the party is out to stop him.
For my world/campaigns, I once changed the vampire's origins. Taking some inspiration from TES, the first vampire was created by the 1st human created, Allin, who descended into evil and became the first dark god. Allin assaulted a woman named Luna, and Luna then became the 1st, pure-blooded vampire, as well as the physical embodiment of Death. Ever since then, pure-blooded vampires are rarely seen/made, but they get a lot more benefits than normal vampires and the number of negative effects they receive is lowered significantly.
AlOh, absolutely I change stuff.
all the time. At this point, for me, it is about making them fit into the logic and nature of the setting, rather than just having them there.
my current effort is a terraformed world, in truth, where six limbed critters were the native creatures. So a lot of six limbed critters live in an area that is pretty much designed to be a dead zone in the player facing materials.
so dragons and centaurs and more are all in one area. And all of them have a very different structural nature from the rest of the game world.
I redid the planes, so each has three kinds of beings from different levels. Each of those got tweaked. Devils are corporeal, for example, and feed on flesh, Yada Yada, while Demons are incorporeal and feed on emotions. Ghasts, ghouls are planer critters, and I shifted Vampires into a category alongside Liches and neither are undead.
the main “monsters” all have a basis, and so forth — this is why I have a grand total of 261 “monsters”, with only 200 of them documented in player side materials.
I have a lot of elements, though I have no elemental planes, and the “primary planes” has the layers of Material, Feywild, Astral, and Ethereal, with the other six reflecting some aspect of each of those in their four layers.
About the only things I haven’t really messed with are gelatinous cubes, lol.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Been contemplating beholderkin without the face and mouth, just floating eyes. Not sure what to do about their bite attack though. A mouth attached to optical nerves?
Just take out the bite attack. Are the eyes attached by anything like optical nerves, or is it just a bunch of floating eyes?
Maybe instead of the one big mouth it's just a sphere covered in stalks and some of those stalks have eyes on them and some of those stalks have little sharp-toothed mouths.
Anzio Faro. Protector Aasimar light cleric. Lvl 18.
Viktor Gavriil. White dragonborn grave cleric. Lvl 20.
Ikram Sahir ibn-Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad. Brass dragonborn draconic sorcerer Lvl 9. Fire elemental devil.
Wrangler of cats.
Or replace every eye that a beholder has with a mouth. A giant many mouthed floating head that has mouths on its eyestalks instead of eyes.
Or replace every eye that a beholder has with an ear. A giant many eared floating head that has ears on its eyestalks instead of eyes. Keep its big mouth, and use it in a quiet place scenario where the characters have to stealth by a blind beholder with a bunch of ear stalks who tries to bite anyone they hear.
I think I got it: there’s the big eye, then at the end of each stalk is some other sensory organ, which can be an eye, ear, mouth, nostril, or touch receptors. It’s extremely cursed an I love it.
I think the hearing and the smell would be done right through the skin, so really the entire creature is both an ear and a nose. I would imagine there being three kinds of stalks. There's the standard eyestalks with powers like any normal beholder's eyestalks. There's the mouth stalks that can bite. And then there are the grasping stalks which are like long tentacles that can grapple enemies and manipulate objects and such.
As a player I would be sobbing in fear at seeing such a creature. But as a DM I would be giggling with joy.
Anzio Faro. Protector Aasimar light cleric. Lvl 18.
Viktor Gavriil. White dragonborn grave cleric. Lvl 20.
Ikram Sahir ibn-Malik al-Sayyid Ra'ad. Brass dragonborn draconic sorcerer Lvl 9. Fire elemental devil.
Wrangler of cats.
Given that Beholderkin are extremely variable in lore, any of these suggestions can be true. And yes, that last part is the intent :).
Speaking of redesigns, though I don’t have any specific ideas, I like the idea of rather than being grotesque, archfiends are every bit as glorious and awe inspiring as they are frightening. I’m imagining a description of a mortal conjurer that came in contact with one, “one eye seeped in terror, the other in joy.” Lesser fiends rarely have this effect because archfiends parasitically drain the “light/life/glory/however to describe it” of their underlings.
Also in my world, wraiths are the undead remains of a vile king or other ruler who continues to rule those around them after they have passed, there subjects being the undead. They can magically control undead, but they usually can't be restored as a king of a living kingdom because of the limitations of death, such as the wasting away of all life around them and the aversion to sunlight. There are also different types of wraiths, like sand wraiths and snow wraiths, which are the spirits of rulers who perished somewhere like in a desert, dune, grave site, or an arctic wasteland and they are bound to that area. They consider the area that they are bound to be their territory and any who die there are cursed to be their subjects and serve their evil masters. However, because they are trapped in a relatively small area, the wraith and their undead minions often spend their times dormant and buried beneath the earth, only rising when their land is disturbed and then they add the intruders to their number.
Wraith of the Lich King, if you will? (A little Wrath of the Lich King World of Warcraft humor)
Check out my publication on DMs Guild: https://www.dmsguild.com/browse.php?author=Tawmis%20Logue
Check out my comedy web series - Neverending Nights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wr4-u9-zw0&list=PLbRG7dzFI-u3EJd0usasgDrrFO3mZ1lOZ
Need a character story/background written up? I do it for free (but also take donations!) - https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?591882-Need-a-character-background-written-up
For one campaign all pre-PC races were prototypes. They were all missing something crucial. Dragons were made before the gods created the full spectrum of emotions. They were amazing in many ways, but their emotional range was very limited, which is why their alignments were so strong.
Giants had a wider range of emotions and they were more diverse but the range of their intelligence was very limited.
Also they never really evolved. They were created for a certain purpose, which was to protect the Prime from invasion. They could have children, but their children were very similar to them in every way.
And they had no souls = no afterlife.
So the mortal races, in all of their physical weakness, were the perfected creation. They were amazingly complicated, evolving, fertile, learning, feeling creatures.
Why? Because in this universe diversity creates diversity. The less diverse the creatures were, the more limited the world itself became. The Mirror World, which was an upside down replica of the "good" universe had become barren and unhospitable because its demon rulers enforced strength and aggression in all of their creation instead of creating diversity. So now they desperately want to conquer the other side because they ruined theirs.
So the Prime gods were chosen because together they had the ability to create life that combined all of the aspects that the universe needed to thrive and win.
Finland GMT/UTC +2
Well, in my world the lore for the entirety of the feywild and the dragons is different, so that technically holds all the creatures under that umbrella in the same state.
The feywild in my world is formed of strong opinions. This makes navigation difficult, because if two people look upon a feature in the material plane and form different opinions on it, it may appear differently in the feywild. For example, if a mountain stands between a city of halflings who live on a plain, and a kingdom of dwarves who live in a mountain range, then from the halfling's side, the mountain will be huge, because that's what the halflings think of it. From the dwarfs side, the mountain will be small, because that's their opinion.
As such, differences of opinion will shape the feywild in all sorts of ways!
Make your Artificer work with any other class with 174 Multiclassing Feats for your Artificer Multiclass Character!
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I have started discussing/reviewing 3rd party D&D content on Substack - stay tuned for semi-regular posts!
That is a cool idea. For my Faeriewilde (the Feywilde) I went back to Goidelic and Brythonic myths, then mixed in some oddities, heavily influenced by Romance and victorian era input, then tweaked through the use of some more modern (post 1990) interpretations of them.
Let's me use all the little folklore around the Good Folk, and heightens the atmosphere of my horror, mystery, and gaslamp adventures.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
Recently did some cool stuff with Groffs. I changed them to be army dogs that served a spring eladrin. Wherever the eladrin wanted to take over, he would order his Groff army to attack there first. The eladrin is about to take over a city called Camelot (very unoriginal name, I know) so he sent his Groffs out to attack it first. I also made them "Variant Groffs" - wherever they went, all the plants around them would grow more and more until their location was completely overgrown and impossible to travel through. The strongest Groff sent to destroy Camelot took over the city's garden called the Garden of Eden (unoriginal again, I'm bad with location names) and is currently resting in the garden.
If anybody would like my GMing playlists
battles: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/2mRp57MBAz9ZsVpw895IzZ?si=243bee43442a4703
exploration: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0qk0aKm5yI4K6VrlcaKrDj?si=81057bef509043f3
town/tavern: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/49JSv1kK0bUyQ9LVpKmZlr?si=a88b1dd9bab54111
character deaths: https://open.spotify.com/playlist/6k7WhylJEjSqWC0pBuAtFD?si=3e897fa2a2dd469e
Reading the description of shadows gave me the impression that they’re less like undead as we usually think of, but rather the suppressed evil desires and inclinations of the person come to “life”. As such I have it that a shadow can come out of a person who’s still alive under certain circumstances, and will torment their originator with dreams of the havoc the shadow is causing.
For my bestairy, I had to come up with a series of "native beasts" and have been having some fun with it. The foundational requirements are six limbed, with slit nostrils and eyes that have a triple pupil. There are five classes: Sky, Sea, Soil, Sand and Smoke. Each class has to have a complete ecological profile. The Soil herbivores are, well, rather hefty boys.
The Sky was pretty easy, of course. Apex is Dragons. And there are Centaurs.
Of course, the hardest part is that all of them are for maxed characters to deal with.
Only a DM since 1980 (3000+ Sessions) / PhD, MS, MA / Mixed, Bi, Trans, Woman / No longer welcome in the US, apparently
Wyrlde: Adventures in the Seven Cities
.-=] Lore Book | Patreon | Wyrlde YT [=-.
An original Setting for 5e, a whole solar system of adventure. Ongoing updates, exclusies, more.
Not Talking About It / Dubbed The Oracle in the Cult of Mythology Nerds
So one of the lores I created for my homebrew is that the Azer are actually dwarves whose sparks from the Life Forge exist.
The Life Forge was using the fires from the Plane of Fire and some of the sparks that fell from the Life Forge and landed back in the Plane of Fire are actually the Azer, in the form of fire dwarves. The Azer are good in nature (generally) - and have opened portals to some of the larger Dwarven Kingdoms and do exchanges - they're often employed to smelt adamantine metal - which in my world, is used for armor and weapons - but also highly regarded, because in the Shadow Realm (essentially my version of the Underdark) the way the moisture interacts with adamantine creates water and can spark lightning and create "mini storms" that help water the plants in the Shadow Realm.
Has anyone done anything specific with the Azer in any of your games (either as a DM, or if you interacted them as players)?
Check out my publication on DMs Guild: https://www.dmsguild.com/browse.php?author=Tawmis%20Logue
Check out my comedy web series - Neverending Nights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wr4-u9-zw0&list=PLbRG7dzFI-u3EJd0usasgDrrFO3mZ1lOZ
Need a character story/background written up? I do it for free (but also take donations!) - https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?591882-Need-a-character-background-written-up
I fought a few Azers once, but I really just scared them into submission. I like your Azer idea, and I just realized a fire genasi would make a good Azer. They have +2 constitution like dwarves, and their flame abilities are all great so if a player wanted to play a Azer as a character, playing a reskinned fire genasi seems like it would work.
The Beholder is a monster that was once a deadly encounter; but now, has been seen as a creature that rules where ever it calls itself home.
What's some cool stuff you've done with a Beholder?
For example - in my main D&D game I run - there's a skull that has a special gem imbued in the eye socket - and it was a religious gem tied to the God of Wisdom, who in my world, was killed when the Spider Queen ascended. Now this gem whispers all kinds of secrets uncontrollably - and people gain incredible knowledge... however, most are driven insane, because once they hear the secrets they can't put it down - and it never stops whispering. Ever. So Wizards who picked it up ended up as Allips, for example.
Well, a Beholder has recently got it - and now learned how to ascend into godhood. And the party is out to stop him.
Check out my publication on DMs Guild: https://www.dmsguild.com/browse.php?author=Tawmis%20Logue
Check out my comedy web series - Neverending Nights: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8Wr4-u9-zw0&list=PLbRG7dzFI-u3EJd0usasgDrrFO3mZ1lOZ
Need a character story/background written up? I do it for free (but also take donations!) - https://forums.giantitp.com/showthread.php?591882-Need-a-character-background-written-up