New monster in my setting

[seasong]

My Story Hour setting, Theralis, has three shadow worlds with strange creatures and their own "sentient rulers" who occasionally decide that our realm is a good target for some conquest (and vice versa). Originally, the three worlds were a mind flayer world, a beholder world, and a spiderkin (think yuan-ti for spiders, or driders and thematically related creatures).

Anyway, with the updated, official SRD not having the mind flayers and beholders, I decided (since we hadn't yet touched on extradimensional threats yet) to go ahead with a different set of creatures. Below is one of them which I could really use some help statting out (I'll need help with all of them eventually, of course, but for now I just need this one).

Although my campaign uses a lot of house rules, I'm building these in standard D&D first, then converting them. I'm building them as a PC race (they always advance by character class), although they are probably ECL +1 or +2.

I'm interested in variant abilities for them, balance issues (what ECL should they be? Is there any way to lower that without compromising flavor?), and ideas of bad things to do with them.

From the story hour:

Eye Tyrants: Eye tyrants are humanoids named for the eyes all over their skull which, chameleon-like, dart in all directions. They have moist, amphibious flesh of dark and muted colors, are taller and far more slender than humans, and possess long fingers with which they are very clever. With a hood, skilled disguise, and very little light or closeness, they could likely pass for a particularly ugly human. Eye tyrants are known as powerful espers, and are one of the reasons that espers are mistrusted - not that a Theralis esper would ever work with eye tyrants, but the history of the eye tyrants shows just how the powers can be abused. Eye tyrants are cold and calculating, and seem to base their society on their strength as espers.

Eye Tyrants

• -2 CON, +2 WIS, +2 CHR.
• Medium size.
• Eye tyrant base speed is 30 feet.
• Dark vision: Eye tyrants can see in the dark up to 120 feet. Darkvision is black and white only, but it is otherwise like normal sight, and eye tyrants can function just fine with no light at all.
• 360 degree vision: Eye tyrants can see in all directions equally well. They can not be flanked, and gain a +4 to all visual Spot checks.
• Dextrous fingers: Eye tyrants recieve a +2 to checks involving manual dexterity such as opening locks, picking pockets, and so on.
• Mindspeech: Eye tyrants can speak to each other (and anyone else with this ability) without sound, up to 30 feet away. Others with mindspeech can always hear this if within range. Characters with one level of Psion may take this ability as a feat. It has no impact on anyone without this ability. Mind speech does not cross language barriers, but the mind speaker is automatically understood by anyone who has any language in common.
• Silent: Eye tyrants have small, jawless mouths, and can not speak normally, although they can make a weak, mewling sound. If they are beyond the normal 30 foot range, they can not communicate with others except through sign language.
• Bonus Language: Any, plus eye tyrant sign language.
• Favored Class: Psion.

 

[NarlethDrider]

and a spiderkin (think yuan-ti for spiders, or driders and thematically related creatures).

I would love to see info on these!

 

[seasong]

From the story hour:

Spiderkin: Spiderkin are mostly humanoid, but vary from individual to individual. They can roughly be classified into four groups: completely humanoid (with minor arachnid traits), half humanoid-half arachnid, completely arachnid (with minor humanoid traits), and shapeshifters (who slip between the different categories). Spiderkin society is a loose coalition of inequality, broken up by family "houses" and full of treacherous political currents. In their humanoid form, the spiderkin resemble beautiful youths with patterned skin coloration and solid black eyes.

They don't have stat blocks yet - I have to finished the eye tyrants before I can start playing with the others, because the PCs encountered some. I do know that the spiderkin will probably be built around a combination of the driders, monstrous spiders, werecreatures (spider), some kind of humanoid, and some custom stuff (like multi-armed humanoids and the like). For the humanoids, I'm still deciding on how human/monstrous/elvish I want them to be.