Ocular adept The ocular adept was a prestige class of Faerûn . By giving themselves to beholders , they gained special abilities that went with their worship of the beholder goddess , the Great Mother . Description . An ocular adept was a divine caster of the Great Mother . What differed an ocular adept from other members of the deity ' s clergy was that they were humanoids and not beholders . Becoming . A humanoid needed to swear to cut all present and future ties with other deities but Great Mother and ask for inclusion into a beholder community as a first step to become an ocular adept . As a second step , the individual needed to willingly undergo a surgery by a beholder to become an ocular adept . The surgery consisted of getting a hole drilled through the forehead by the surgeon through its " disintegrate " eye ray as the first step . The second step was to get an eye from an eyeball implanted in the new hole , the death throes of the eye connected it with the new host . The surgery concluded with a chant that turned the eye functional and gave the " patient " new abilities . A sturdy and enduring body as well as some capability at maintaining a mental focus was needed to survive the process . Abilities . An ocular adept had access to spells like other clerics , unlike other clerics though an ocular adept didn ' t have access to strong spells but only to , comparatively , weak spells , albeit , especially those who were clerics to begin with , in a large number . An ocular adept ' s most distinguishing feature was its third eye , the connection to its brain it gave the host the ability to understand the beholder language and a mind set alien from human point of view . The third eye was able to see , an ocular adept had better sight than normal people . With growing strength , the eye in the forehead also gained a number of abilities , namely the ability to shoot eye rays with the effects of " charm person " , " sleep " , " inflict moderate wounds " , " slow " , " fear " , " charm monster " , " telekinesis " , " flesh and stone " , " disintegrate " and " finger of death " . Role . Ocular adepts often fulfilled the role of cult leaders serving a beholder . They were recruited from the most devout individuals inside a given cult and were often under the employ of a so called sane beholder , a beholder who had both of its mind under a functional working relationship . Their comparatively huge repertoire of weak spells combined with their eye rays from the third eye allowed them to keep their cultists in line . While their third eye was offsetting for non - beholders , they were the closest thing a beholder individual or community had to a presentable envoy with some importance and fulfilled negotiation jobs for their masters with humanoids . Truth . A beholder ' s view on the ocular adepts ran the entire gamut from pawn to cattle , the deity Great Mother wasn ' t an exception . What an ocular adept mistook for - - impossible to understand - - divine messages , were in fact the remains of the eyeball ' s psyche . The reason , why an ocular adept didn ' t have access to the strong spells was simply that the Great Mother didn ' t want to give the strong ones to a non - beholder , in fact the Great Mother could kill an ocular adept at any time by disintegration channeled through the third eye .