Anyone who has ever gone to the optometrist knows the terror of that half second before they unleash a puff of air into our eyes to test for glaucoma. There’s just something about the eyes that leave us feeling at our most vulnerable. Even more terrifying than trauma to our eyes is the thought that they may be stolen and used by nefarious monsters.

If you’re in the unenviable position of picturing a hive of angry eyes floating around to wreak havoc on the world, then you may just be beginning to picture one of the particularly unnerving creatures in Kobold Press’s Tome of Beasts 1: the oculo swarm.

• What Is an Oculo Swarm?
• What Can an Oculo Swarm Do?
• How to Use an Oculo Swarm in Your Game

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What Is an Oculo Swarm?

Oculo swarms are the failed experiments in creating living scrying sensors that have gotten loose and gained their own self-awareness. These creatures then proceed to add more and more eyeballs to themselves, forming a swarming hive, or, if I may, a h-eye-ve. If you’re playing Baldur’s Gate 3, they’re yet another reason to take out every one of those purple floating scry spheres as soon as you can! Future adventurers will thank you!

Though functioning as a single consciousness, the oculo swarm can separate itself down into individual eyes to serve as spies and scouts. As long as even one eyeball remains, the oculo swarm can survive, collecting fresh eyes to rebuild itself until it can return to its full menacing self.

What Can an Oculo Swarm Do?

I’ve plucked a few of my favorite features and abilities of the oculo swarm for you to see the threat this CR 4 monster possesses.

Extraction Point

The primary attack of the oculo swarm is an ability called Extract Eye, which is fairly self explanatory in title alone. Mechanically, Extract Eye functions as a Multiattack action for the creature. The oculo swarm moves into a creature’s space and makes a pair of +7 melee weapon attacks. If both attacks succeed, the creature then must make a DC 13 Strength saving throw or have its eye extracted.

Having half or fewer of one’s eyes removed results in the creature rolling at disadvantage on attack rolls and Wisdom (Perception) checks. Fittingly, having more than half or all of one’s eyes plucked out results in the blinded condition. The eyes can be reattached following the defeat of the oculo swarm. This requires a successful DC 12 Wisdom (Medicine) check within an hour of the removal.

Gaze Upon the Swarm!

The big crux of what makes the oculo swarm such a threat is its ability to function as a single hive mind of individual, disconnected eyeballs. In combat this serves two functions.

First, it means the swarm has advantage on Wisdom (Perception) rolls that require sight, and on saving throws against being blinded, to reflect the idea that there are always more eyes somewhere lurking around. It also negates abilities like Sneak Attack or Pack Tactics that rely on distracting or surrounding a target.

Secondly, the oculo swarm has a special action called Disorienting Gaze. When this gets activated, the swarm can make its eyes suddenly move in multiple directions. Creatures witnessing this must make a DC 13 Charisma saving throw or take 6d6 psychic damage, and become disoriented, which means they have the incapacitated condition until the end of their next turn, and move in a random direction whenever they move. Creatures who make the save only take half the damage and are not disoriented.

Don’t Blink or You’ll Miss This

There is a bit of good news for a creature fighting the oculo swarm though. While the swarm can move in and out of their spaces making it tough to pin down, the swarm cannot regain health or even gain temporary hit points, so each eye you take down is done for. To reflect the diminished power of the swarm, once it loses half its hit points, the Extract Eye attack only deals half its normal damage, dropping from 4d8 to 2d8 piercing damage.

How to Use an Oculo Swarm in Your Game

As a CR 4 monster, the oculo swarm feels primed to offer a challenging and interesting threat for 1st tier heroes or what the 2014 Dungeon Master’s Guide calls local heroes. The visuals alone are something to drive up the threat level for your players, but here are some suggestions for ways to take advantage of the flavor of the oculo swarm as a monster.

Lie Detector

This suggestion comes straight from the Tome of Beasts 1 book, where it says that wizards in Kobold Press’s Midgard setting will use the oculo swarm as a lie detector, having it watch for visual cues of eye movement. While the swarm has no vocal abilities, the flavor text suggests it can change the color of its irises to communicate with the wizard. The wizards are known to allow the swarm to pluck new eyes for itself from the skulls of those it has snitched on however, so who’s to say an enterprising oculo swarm might not craft a lie or two itself to expand its size using honest eyes?

Neighborhood Watch

Building off this same color-changing iris flavor, another fun way that an oculo swarm could be deployed in defense of a lair is by combining that with its power to separate itself into individual eyes. Players exploring the various rooms of a dungeon might be grossed out to find a series of disconnected eyeballs laying in different rooms. But will they suspect that those eyeballs are actually tracking their movement throughout the dungeon, reporting their progress back to whomever is in charge with ever-changing color signals?

The Eyes Have It

Body horror stuff ranks pretty highly for me when it comes to the most unsettling of creatures. Doubly so are things that feature far too many sets of eyes. With that in mind, this creature from the pages of Tome of Beasts 1 makes my own eyes twitch. The oculo swarm poses a threat to players beyond simple damage, and it has built-in survivability that allows it to return for revenge, which is always a bit fun for story reasons. But maybe don’t threaten it with puffs of air, you’ll just make it angry.

Can you see yourself using an oculo swarm in your games?

Riley Silverman (@rileyjsilverman) is a contributing writer to D&D Beyond, Nerdist, and SYFY Wire. She DMs the Theros-set Dice Ex Machina for the Saving Throw Show, and has been a player on the Wizards of the Coast-sponsored The Broken Pact. Riley also played as Braga in the official tabletop adaptation of the Rat Queens comic for HyperRPG, and currently plays as The Doctor on the Doctor Who RPG podcast The Game of Rassilon. She currently lives in Los Angeles.