![[GreatMother.png]] **The Great Mother** **Greater Deity** **Alignment**: Chaotic Evil --- ### Overview The Great Mother is the enigmatic and alien goddess of the beholders, ruling over madness, chaos, and the unfathomable void. She embodies the alien origins, paranoia, and destructive impulses that characterize all beholders. As the progenitor of their kind, she is revered (and feared) by all who descend from her vast and writhing form. Her nature defies mortal understanding; she exists beyond time and space, her will unknowable, and her goals seemingly contradictory. She births beholders and monstrosities from her infinite imagination, sending them spiraling across the planes as agents of her will or her madness. --- ### Domain and Influence The Great Mother’s domain transcends the physical and the material. It is a place of infinite horror and unspeakable geometry, existing in the Far Realm the alien void beyond known planes. She draws her power from realms of chaos and madness, where mortal minds cannot survive intact. Her influence stretches into reality when beholders dream, for it is said all dreams of the beholders are whispers from the Great Mother. Through these chaotic visions, she births new beholderkin, shaping their form with a twist of madness, paranoia, and hatred. --- ![[GreatMotherSymbol.png]] ### Symbols and Icons The Great Mother's **symbol** is often abstract and difficult to comprehend, representing eyes swirling around a chaotic void, reminiscent of beholders themselves. Shrines to her often depict: - **Eyes**: Unblinking and layered in twisted spirals, symbolizing her omniscient and all-seeing nature. - **Tentacles and Orbs**: Common motifs on idols, signifying her influence as both the mother of aberrations and the force behind endless alien creation. Colours associated with her worship are deep violet, black, and glimmers of unnatural green, hues that reflect the void and alien intellect of her nature. --- ### Worship and Tributes Worship of the Great Mother is rare among mortals but absolute among beholders. Her followers revere her with an instinctive zeal, yet they also fear her capricious and unpredictable will. Her worship includes: - **The Rite of Eyes**: Beholders and their cultists offer sacrifices by plucking out eyes—those of victims or their own minions believing such gifts satisfy her hunger for vision. - **Nightmare Rituals**: Some seek to _commune_ with her through forced trances or hallucinogenic rituals, inducing madness to glimpse her realm in the Far Realm. - **Monstrous Creation**: Devotees perform twisted experiments on themselves and others in an attempt to emulate her ability to create life, birthing mutations and aberrations. Though few mortal cultists survive long under her influence, insane prophets sometimes found nihilistic, eldritch cults that venerate her unknowable will. --- ### Clergy and Temples Beholders serve as her clergy, for they are her chosen children. Each beholder believes itself to be a perfectly unique masterpiece shaped directly by her dreams. Yet they compete and destroy one another in paranoid fits, believing this to be her design as well. Mortals who worship the Great Mother are few and invariably insane. The most fanatic become _warlocks_ who strike terrifying bargains to draw power from her unfathomable domain, receiving blessings of tentacles, alien appendages, and mind-twisting powers. Temples to the Great Mother are rare. Instead, **foul caverns** or crumbling, twisted spires deep in the Underdark serve as profane sites, adorned with alien carvings of writhing eyes, tentacles, and structures that seem _impossible_. --- ### Powers and Abilities The Great Mother’s power is incomprehensible and unrestrained, weaving chaos and horror into physical form. Among her abilities are: - **Birth of Madness**: She births endless variations of beholders and other aberrations, each perfectly unique and imbued with alien purpose. - **Whispers of Paranoia**: She instils paranoia, rivalry, and delusions into mortals and beholders alike, driving them to war or self-destruction. - **Eye of the Void**: Her power manifests as beams of devastating energy that erase minds, bodies, and even memories from existence. - **Warp Reality**: In her presence, reality twists and distorts, violating the laws of physics and sanity. Structures warp, organic material decays, and geometry defies logic. Her followers, though limited by their mortal bodies, often gain access to powerful eye-rays, madness-infused spells, or psionic abilities that mimic beholder powers. --- ### Treatment of the Faithful The Great Mother views all life (except beholders) as _insignificant_, existing only as raw material for torment or consumption. Her treatment of the faithful is equal parts blessing and curse: - **Blessings of Mutation**: Devoted followers are “blessed” with horrifying physical mutations: additional eyes, writhing tentacles, or bodies twisted beyond recognition. - **Insightful Madness**: She grants fragments of alien knowledge to her most zealous worshipers, leaving them mad but terrifyingly aware of truths about the cosmos. - **Manifest Destiny**: Beholders, as her children, are emboldened to create or destroy as they see fit, believing their will to be hers. Those who fail her especially foolish mortal cultists are consumed by madness or transformed into eyeless husks, their bodies left twitching and empty. --- ### Myths and Legends **The Dream That Birthed the World**: Legends say the Great Mother’s dreams created the first beholders, shaping them as cruel, sentient agents of chaos who resemble fragmented echoes of herself. Each beholder's dream carries her power, birthing new aberrant progeny. **The Eye of the Abyss**: Myths tell of a massive eye somewhere in the Far Realm, belonging to the Great Mother herself. To behold it is to witness oblivion and lose one’s sense of identity to her unfathomable mind. **The Betrayal of the Many Eyes**: One tale whispers that the Great Mother _allowed_ a beholder to dream itself free of her control, creating the hive-mind-like elder orbs. This entity split from her will, igniting eternal conflict between beholders as they strove to be superior to one another. --- ### Encounters with the Great Mother’s Influence The Great Mother’s will seeps into the material world through **beholders**, twisted creations, and incursions from the Far Realm: - **Alien Aberrations**: Adventurers may face monstrosities that bear features reminiscent of beholders, such as writhing tentacles or unblinking eyes. - **Beholder Lairs**: The twisted lairs of beholders are suffused with her influence—geometry is warped, air crackles with psionic energy, and paranoia fills all who enter. - **Cult Prophecies**: Nihilistic cults serve as her mortal mouthpieces, uttering truths that can shatter sanity or bring about planar rifts leading to the Far Realm. - **Manifestations of Madness**: Regions near her influence may succumb to twisted horrors—constant hallucinations, undulating ground, shifting corridors, and strange mutations among creatures. --- ### Conclusion The Great Mother is a force beyond understanding—a being of pure chaos and madness who exists as the unknowable architect of beholders and their paranoia-driven existence. Whether as a whispering presence in the dreams of aberrations or a malignant source of chaos manifesting in the material world, her alien touch brings destruction, warped creation, and cosmic horror to all who dare to tread too close.