For vision, I'd actually nominate the Mantis Shrimp:
listverse.com wrote:Mantis shrimp have much better color vision than humans (their eyes having 12 types of color receptors, whereas humans have only three), as well as ultraviolet, infrared and polarized light vision, thus having the most complex eyesight of any animal known. The eyes are located at the end of stalks, and can be moved independently from each other, rotating up to 70 degrees. Interestingly, the visual information is processed by the eyes themselves, not the brain.
Even more bizarre; each of the mantis shrimp’s eyes is divided in three sections allowing the creature to see objects with three different parts of the same eye. In other words, each eye has “trinocular vision” and complete depth perception, meaning that if a mantis shrimp lost an eye, its remaining eye would still be able to judge depth and distance as well as a human with his two eyes. Scientists are only starting to understand the mysteries of Stomatopod vision; for the moment, we can only imagine what the world really looks like to a mantis shrimp.
However, I'd like to nominate a subspecies of bioengineered humans. Almost alien looking with large eyes, numerous chimeric additions, and either powerful psionics or highly advanced technologies.
Looking for some reason for their rampage, I came up with this backstory -- These Beholders had cloistered themselves away from the ravaged world for decades in an old art museum, all these years secluded away from the outside world and surrounded by the beauty of the artwork drove them mad. Then one day the museum was discovered by a band of scavengers (maybe a band of Wolf Barbarians) looking for valuables to sell. This attack by scavengers who were seeing their art as items only to sell for profit, and not appreciated and fawned over angered them to the point to begin their genocidal campaign.
The question then becomes, how are these "Beholders" conducting their genocidal campaign? After some pondering, I keep thinking back to a scene from the old 1950's War of the Worlds movies, three large war machines protected by impenetrable shields, slowly advancing across the countryside, killing all in their path. Though for this, I'd change the heat rays to Medusa Rays; everyone struck by them would be turned into calcified (stone) statues. Their madness would see this as poetic justice, turning these pitiful creatures that cannot possibly understand or appreciate "true" beauty into works of art, and then leaving these works of art scattered across the landscape.
The hook for the adventure would be that one of the scavengers was able to elude capture and then escaped the museum after the Beholders "killed" the rest of the scavengers and left on their genocidal rampage. The group could be brought into the story in a number of ways, here are some examples:
* After finding a village populated only by these odd statues, they encounter the escaped scavenger who relates his mad tale.
* Cardanian scouts capture and interrogated the escaped scavenger, and the group is assigned to validate his mad claims.
* A wealthy individual hires the group to discover what happened to the scavengers he hired to loot an old museum hidden in the ruins of a distant city. They then encounter the surviving scavenger and a few Beholders who have stayed behind to guard the museum.
I've expanded on this and posted it on my blog (link below)
