Argus

The Argus is a dream curdled into a nightmare: a giant amoeba with a great central eye segmented like a jewel, its gooey body studded with a hundred smaller eyes that twitch and blink in unison. From its bulk sprout wet pseudopods tipped with fanged mouths that probe the air or clutch strange, half-digested tools suspended in the translucent mucus of its ever-shifting form. The creature emits the cloying scent of flowers, sickly sweet, masking the reek of its unnatural life. Its powerfully alien mind enables it to levitate unnaturally or slither up sheer stone with psychic force. Such creatures like to soften their prey with prismatic rays from their many eyes while deploying eldritch magic from the school of dimension, before enveloping their victims inside their acidic bodies. No one knows how these creatures are organized, or where they originate from in the Outer Realms: when threatened, they slice through the veil to gate in more of their kind. But worse of all, their chaotic touch can transform victims into amoebae like them, destabilizing their victim’s reality with infectious psionics. The Argus is an affront to the notion of fixed reality, and wherever it goes, the boundaries between matter, thought, and flesh begin to blur.

Argus are otherworldly invaders best played as chaos-wielding spellcasters that undermine player expectations with alien logic. A single Argus may creep into the material realm in search of a MacGuffin the PCs possess, or to kidnap a subject for experiments, gating in allies from the Outer Realms only if feels outmatched. The Argus likes to absorb enchanted gear or swallow spellcasters whole in order to feed off their residual magical energy. Its amorphous nature makes it physically impossible to pin down, and its all-around vision grants it immunity to surprise. An Argus employs both debilitating status effects as rays emitted from its many eyes, and stores magical treasures in its body, which it uses against its foes as the opportunity arises. Its legendary touch can transform victims into a budding Argus; if the victim dies while undergoing the transformation, they rise again as a fully formed Argus. As a GM, you should dramatize their mutability: let the Argus’ form shift mid-battle, adapting mouths into hands and hands into weapons procured from its gullet. It might gate itself out of the encounter when threatened, only to reappear later with friends, to menace the party.