Gaming Guest Post

FuzzyGeff was kind enough to do a write up of the Eye Spiker for me.  His invention, he deserves all credit and blame.

The eyespiker may be my most feared creation, which is odd, since I wasn’t the GM when I came up with it.

It works like so: Glowing mystic runes appear on the ground, swirl about, and disappear in a flash of color; where they were, is now a tiny demonic being, dressed for mountain climbing. I point out a victim, whereupon the demon cackles gleefully and gives chase. If the victim sticks around, the demon climbs him, wraps its tail around his neck, and gets to work.

The eyespiker’s job is pretty self-explanatory. It pulls a metal rod from its belt, points it straight at one of the victim’s eyes, and pulls a handle; the rod is now L-shaped and barbed. The barbed end is, of course, pointed at the aforementioned eye. The demon pulls out a mallet, and (I assume) gains the victim’s undivided attention. As long as the poor bastard keeps spending every action he gets struggling to avoid getting a real close look at sharp, shiny metal, things don’t get any worse.

Otherwise, the eyespiker earns his name. He pounds that barbed spike through the eye and into the skull, then taps the handle on the side, giving the spike a 90° twist. Then, he puts away the hammer, draws forth the second spike, and repeats the process on the remaining eye. If anybody is getting bright ideas about toughing this out with three or more eyes, they will find that there are always enough spikes.

The mechanism is actually quite simple: the spell Perfect Illusion, ideally cast at double cost in order to fool the sense of touch. All the details are me earning my Illusion Art skill. The practical effect is just keeping one enemy from doing anything, at the cost of one illusion wizard doing nothing else. Sure, I could just put an imaginary bucket of shit on the guy’s head (hey, there’s no extra cost to fool the sense of taste...), but nobody would ask me to write that up for their blog a decade or two later.