Art by Chippy. Copyright 2009 Wizards of the Coast.

This article is part of a series! Click here to see the other entries.

This is another one of those entries that gives us more stat blocks for monsters introduced in the first Monster Manual.

The Lore

We already covered the bulk of cyclops lore in the corresponding Monster Manual post, so I’ll going to say it’s super cool and ask you to read the original post again.

We get some specific lore for the two new variants: Cyclops Crushers are employed as slave minders, directing their crushing towards any who step out of line. Feyblades are pampered bodyguards who rarely engaged in manual labor, and like to lord their superior status over their less important colleagues.

The Numbers

The original post also contains the traits for cyclopes, but I’ll summarize them again for convenience: they’re Large Fey Humanoids, trained in perception, and have Truesight, which lets them see invisible creatures and objects. They all also have some sort of Evil Eye ability that varies per stat block.

Cyclops Crusher

This one appears in the Monster Vault, so it’s also covered in the original post. Its MM2 stat block is identical as far as abilities go, but suffers from all the math bugs common at the time of publication. Go with the Monster Vault stat block and you won’t be missing anything.

Cyclops Feyblade

The first cyclops we haven’t already seen in our Let’s Reads is a Level 21 Soldier with 200 HP, which means it’s significantly stronger than all the other cyclopes we’ve seen so far. It wears mail and fights with a longsword. Its speed is 8. It’s more or less equivalent to a simplified PC swordmage.

Despite its greater level the feyblade is actually very mechanically simple. The Longsword is its most basic and best attack, doing physical damage with no riders. The Evil Eye is a Ranged 20 minor action that marks a target automatically, lasting until the end of the encounter or until the feyblade marks someone else.

This cyclops earns its title because it knows Wildstep, an immediate interrupt that triggers when the marked victim ignores the mark. The feyblade can then teleport 10 squares to be adjacent to the victim and make an attack to it that deals sligthly less damage than the basic sword.

Sample Encounters and Final Impressions

Not all cyclopes are slaves to the fomorians, but the MM2 seems to want to emphasize their “natural” position as someone else’s goons and mentions they can also be found serving firbolg and drow. This would eventually be elaborated into a code of honor that prevents oaths of servitude from being broken.

The sample encounter is Level 13: 2 crushers, 2 eladrin bladesingers and 1 firbolg moon seer.

Cyclopes are cool, and more of them means more choice for a fey paragon campaign versus the Fomorians. So I like these ones.