A baleful eye peers out from the darkness, its gleam hinting at a weird intelligence and unnerving malevolence. Most times, a nothic is content to watch, weighing and assessing the creatures it encounters. When driven to violence, it uses its horrific gaze to rot the flesh from its enemies' bones.

!!Cursed Arcanists

Rather than gaining the godlike supremacy they crave, some wizards who devote their lives to unearthing arcane secrets are reduced to creeping, tormented monsters by a dark curse left behind by Vecna, a powerful lich who, in some worlds, has transcended his undead existence to become a god of secrets. Nothics retain no awareness of their former selves, skulking amid the shadows and haunting places rich in magical knowledge, drawn by memories and impulses they can't quite understand.

!!Dark Oracles

Nothics possess a strange magical insight that allows them to extract knowledge from other creatures. This grants them unique understanding of secret and forbidden lore, which they share for a price. A nothic covets magic items, greedily accepting such gifts from creatures that seek out its knowledge.

!!Lurkers in Magical Places

Nothics are notorious for infiltrating arcane academies and other places rich in magical learning. They are driven by the vague knowledge that there exists a method to reverse their condition. This isn't a clear sense of purpose, but rather an obsessive tug at the end of the mind. Some nothics are clever enough to realize that this is merely part of the strange lesson for their folly, a false hope to drive them to seek out more arcane secrets.

!!Nothic

Witness to the Weird

Consumed by their thirst for forbidden knowledge, nothics are cursed lore seekers transformed by secrets never meant to be known. The bodies of these former scholars are warped into otherworldly shapes, each with a head dominated by a gigantic, unblinking eye. Nothics remember nothing of their past lives and care only for their endless pursuit of hidden mysteries and uncanny truths. They seek revelations amid the rubble of forgotten ruins, and they use their supernatural sight to pierce magical deceptions, rot the flesh of enemies, and steal the secrets of those who interrupt their investigations.

Some nothics seek to end the curse that warped them into their bizarre forms, but many are unaware of—or uninterested in—their transformation.

Deeper. Deeper and Deeper. Deeper and creeper. Creeping they come. Up from the place that isn't a place. They come to feed. Feed on what I know. So I hide. I hide away. Away in the secret dark. Secret and dark, like all that I know I shouldn't know!