The Eye of Bim.

This is my recollection of a character known for part of his adventuring career as “The eye of Bim”. Many years ago during one of my longest running D&D campaigns one of my players wanted to play when none of the other players were around but with one of his normal characters (everyone had 2, 3 even 4 characters in the campaign). After decide he wanted to use his elven Mu/Thief (mostly a thief) Crisium I said, sure I’ll work some stuff up. The first solo-session he chose to raid the tower of a plane-hopping wizard where he acquired a magical gem. It took him some time to figure out what the gem was for (it was a focus for plane hopping) and after a few more mundane thiefly exploits he managed to get the gem to function and it swept him to an alien land.

This alien land could have had a name, but it’s lost to the sands of time (this would have been 88-90 in the real world) but it’s name would likely not have stood out the most what was strange was it’s organic nature, the planet (the whole plane?) was a living thing. The grounds was skin covered in here and there in fungus, hair, and festering sores, there were deserts covered in dry cracked skin and while water (outside the deserts) fell from the sky the general fleshy damp nature of a living world resulted in lakes and ponds of all sorts of unusual fluids.  There were occupants of the worlds and they were strange indeed mostly one eyed things which hope don a single leg or growled about as centipedes.

Crisium sighted some mountains of exotic aspect far in the distance of his point of arrival and headed out for them not aware that he was a hunted elf. He was unaware that the gem he stole had been stolen from what might have been the mightiest sorcerer on this plane and soon fell into the clutches of Bim. (I actually forget the description of Bim itself aside from begin a powerful one-eyed alien sorcerer with spells that focused on shaping and conjuring.)

Following his capture Crisium was awarded a new role in life and a new gem placed in the center of his forehead that appeared as an unusual third eye, this gift (punishment) was used by the sorcerer to call the character Crisium from his home plane back to the the realm of Bim where the demonic aspects and thinly skills of an elven mu/t in this world was fairly useful and he served as “The Eye of Bim”.

There were solo-adventures over the following year or two on Bim’s home plane and elsewhere in the cosmos, we even had one session of the main campaign where a number of the PCs tried to make a raid on Bim to break the bond he had on Crisium no one was slain but it was a disaster. As a DM I was fortunate to have a player that was eager to play and absolutely went wild over truly weird fantasy.

I bring this up these memories now because this is a recollection of gaming past and the postings on Xor brought it to the surface. I’ve always enjoyed odd and bizarre settings even if for occasional diversions (maybe they are best as that), to have expectations challenged and just thrown away entirely by changing ones relationship to the terrain itself can have significant and entertaining impact on a campaign.

Oh what happened to Eye of Bim himself? With the help of another PC he learned how to minimize the ability of Bim to summon him so he got called less often and as many of the characters in that campaign did he became a victim of the the great TPK (that itself was a baffling wonder as the players had multiple characters all over the campaign world, on other planes, and in other times and still managed to get together 90% or more of the PCs in one place and screw up really badly).