Beholder

Drow clowns make a different kind of balloon animal

A beholder is a giant lumpy... thing that looks like a floating octopus with a giant eye in the middle. The tentacles also have eyes at the end of them. Yuck.

Beholders, like Mind Flayers, are considered "intellectual property" of TSR Wizards of the Coast, so they aren't allowed to be used in third party D&D supplements or in Pathfinder as they were not covered under the Open Gaming License. This naturally doesn't stop weirdly similar creatures from appearing in various weeaboo JRPGs and related works, where they're usually called "gazers" or similar. Yes, this includes Monstergirls. Of course one game even used the name beholder, but we all excuse it, because this game is THE GAME. THE LEGEND.

The Beholder first appeared on the cover of the Greyhawk supplement for the Original Dungeons and Dragons. The creation of Spelljammer where beholders play an major role resulted in the creation of many varieties of beholders. Much information about their biology and culture was revealed in the book Lords of Madness. They also got an entire book to themselves in second edition called I, Tyrant.

Personality and Characteristics

Beholders are selfish bastards who love to manipulate and enslave any races considered beneath themselves (i.e. every other species). They are extremely xenophobic even going so far as to kill other individuals of their species that look even slightly different from themselves, though they always go after the more extreme divergences first; two beholders will gang up on the "freak" with scales and fiery eyes before trying to kill each other over the differences in their numbers of teeth. Soooo basically the D&D equivalent of a Dalek. Even if two beholders look identical to each other they will struggle to cooperate with each other due to their extreme paranoia. Large groups of beholders can only work together while under the mind control of a beholder hive mother or an overseer.

Despite this, or perhaps because of it, the beholder race has a lot of genetic variety (as evidenced by the number of Beholder variants, all of whom hate each other, as listed below). They are greedy, often living in dungeons stuffed with valuables. They can cast magic from their eyes and often rule over unwilling souls through domination. One even runs the Thieves' Guild of Skullport, the most recent of several beholders to have done so.

Beholders worship the Great Mother and due to their massive egos, each beholder is convinced that not only does the Great Mother look exactly like itself, but also that it's literally their mother (false memories are funny like that). Beholders would be shocked and possibly driven mad (or madder than they already are) if they found out that the Great Mother, despite possessing vast knowledge, is completely insane and acts mainly on instinct instead of logic, unlike her children. Beholders also have another god named Gzemnid who is associated with gases and deception. Worshipers of Gzemnid are considered heretics by other beholders because they believe that the Great Mother is actually constantly changing in appearance and creates different breeds of beholders every time she reproduces so there is no master race of beholder.

Part of the reason why beholders are so egotistical and paranoid is because they actually possess two minds. They do most of their thinking with their rational mind, but they also possess an intuitive mind which can censor the beholder from experiencing anything that might threaten their ego. This causes the beholder's rational mind to have no memory of times when they failed at anything, and to try to explain the missing memories with conspiracy theories.

Like Aboleths, when a beholder is born, they inherent memories from their parent, though not a complete set of memories. This is why trying to raise a baby beholder to be good is a terrible idea, as their xenophobic beliefs are one of the things they inherent.

While good beholder technically are possible, they are extremely rare because turning good requires a beholder to give up on everything they have ever believed since birth, which by beholder standards would make them insane even compared to other insane beholders. Even beholders that are tolerant enough of non-beholders to work with them are usually still evil and tend to become crime bosses.

A standard beholder has a roughly spherical body with no distinction between their head and torso. Their skin comes in a wide variety of colors and textures. They have large mouth full of sharp teeth and a single central eye that constantly projects an anti-magic cone when it is open. At the top of their head are ten stalks tipped with smaller eyes. In some beholder breeds the eye stalks resemble tentacles while in others they are jointed. Each of theses eyes can fire a magical ray at will, with each eye having a different ray. Theses rays are: Charm Person, Charm Monster, Sleep, Telekinesis, Flesh to Stone, Disintegrate, Fear, Slow, Cause Serious Wounds, and Death. They have no other appendages besides these eye stalks. A beholder can levitate and fly. This ability is not magical in nature as it isn't affected by anti-magic fields or else beholders would knock each other out of the air by looking at one another. Beholders with significant deviations from this form are known as Beholderkin. Beholderkin may be born randomly from beholders, and are usually killed at birth, or may be intentionally birthed by beholder Hive Mothers. Beholders posses both male and female reproductive organs inside of their mouth, but they usually reproduce by self-fertilization since most beholders hate each other too much to willingly mate with each other. In 5th edition this is retconned and beholders now spontaneously create new beholders and beholderkin by altering reality while dreaming.

Notable Variants

2nd & 3rd Edition

True Beholders

• Beholder: Your basic beholder. A central eye that projects an anti-magic cone and ten smaller eyes that each fire a different ray, such as charm person, disintegrate, and flesh to stone.
• Elder Orb: A larger beholder with a much longer than normal lifespan. Always has at least 6 levels of sorcerer.
• Hive Mother/Hive Tyrant: The highest ranked of all beholders and beholderkin. Basically a bigger meaner beholder that holds beholders and beholderkin under its sway. It has the ability to control other beholders and beholderkin, and has the ability spawn new kinds of beholderkin specialized for different tasks. Beholder hives are almost always ruled by a Hive Mother, which keeps the different kinds of beholders and kin from killing each other, and when Hive Mothers belonging to the same breed come together, they can form beholder cities. In 2nd edition, Hive Mothers have their smaller eyes set in a ring around their head instead of being on the ends of stalks, making them less maneuverable but also less vulnerable to being cut off, while in 3rd edition they are just extra large beholders.

Beholderkin

• Gauth: Basically, babby's first beholder, with only 6 eyestalks of doom and a reduced ability to disintegrate everyone and eats magic. Looks like a smaller beholder with a ring of useless extra eyes around the central eye and four of its ten stalks don't have eyes on the end.
• Eyeball: Tiny beholder, best used as a familiar. Pretty damn adorable for a beholder, still Neutral Evil. They have four eye stalks with ray of frost, cause fear, daze, and mage hand and can only use one of them at a time. The central eye doesn't do anything.
• Death Kiss: instead of dispensing death-beams from its eyestalks, they use them to suck your blood. Their only eye has no powers, but they release electric shocks when they are injured.
• Astereater: giant space-faring asteroid beholderkin with no eyestalks that eats your ship. For some reason it likes to enslave Giff to use as soldiers. Spelljammer was weird. Beholders and other beholderkin insist that they have no relation to them.
• Examiner: Four eyestalks, four limbs, and no central eye. Their limbs let them use tools and weapons, and they can create magic items. They also regenerate 1 hit point every round.
• Observer: A powerful psionic beholder with a hard shell, six eye-stalks, three large eyes spaced evenly around its middle, and three mouths on the ends of long retractable stalks that suck blood similar to a death kiss. It uses its psionic abilities to brainwash other monsters into its loyal servants. Less evil than other beholders.
• Lensman: Beholder infantry. The lowest of all beholderkin, or at least until the Eyeball was introduced. Imagine a starfish, then add a giant eye and mouth in the middle of its body, then replace four of its five arms with the arms and legs of an ape. The eye may have one of six different powers. They do not levitate but their limbs allow them to use weapons and tools.
• Watcher: the second lowest of beholderkin. Has three normal eyes around its body and a large compound eye on the top surrounded by six eyespots, and a single tentacle on the bottom which can inflict electric shocks. Its three regular eyes each have two different powers, and the compound eye can use three of those powers. Can cast the message and tongues spells. They are cowardly and mainly act as scouts for their more powerful cousins.
• Spectator: true neutral beholderkin. It's actually pretty swell, as far as beholders go. Remember that one beholder in Baldur's Gate? They can be summoned with a ritual using four beholder's eyestalks. They make excellent guards since they are content to spend very long periods of time in deep contemplation and don't need to be fed since they can magically create their own food. Has only four eye-stalks and the central eye reflects magic instead.
• Overseer: a beholderkin that looks like a giant fleshy tree trunk with thirteen eyestalk branches, tentacles for roots, no central eye, and several mouths at the base. Yes, I realize that it looks nothing like a beholder, but the book says it is so fuck it, let's call it a beholder. Like the hive mother, it also has the ability to dominate other beholders and beholderkin. In large beholder cities, the Hive Mother dominates the Overseers, who then dominated other beholders and kin for her, thus greatly increasing the number of a beholders a Hive Mother can control at one time.
• Eye of the Deep: it's like a beholder BUT UNDERWATER! And it tastes oddly of shrimp. Also, it's got little arms with crab-pincers. Only has two eye stalks and the central eye can flash blinding light. Also can cast the spell persistent image, which it uses to create illusions of mermaids and other things to lure victims closer. Rarely interacts with other kinds of beholders due to them living in different environments.
• Director: beholder cavalry. A beholderkin with six eyestalks and three tentacles on the bottom that it uses to bond with and ride vermin, usually giant centipedes. Because haven't we all wanted to ride a giant centipede like a pony up and down the streets... SHUT UP, I DON'T JUDGE YOU! Has six eye stalks and its central eye generates a protective forcefield around itself and its mount.
• Gouger: A beholderkin created to fight beholders. In the Forgotten Realms setting, they were created by Phaerimms. Larger than regular beholders and has four small useless legs hanging off of its body. It has the same number of eyes as a standard beholder but does not have any eye powers other than the central antimagic eye. It attacks with a 15 foot long barbed tongue which it uses to disable other beholder's eyes.
• Gorbel: Six eye stalks without any eye powers, no central eye, rubbery flesh that causes blunt weapons to harmlessly bounce off, and a pair of claws. They are stupid and try to eat anything that moves. Its claws are so strong that once it has grabbed a creature it is impossible to shake off until it is dead and their bodies are filled with gas that explodes on contact with air so do your best to kill them before they grab you or figure out a way to kill it without rupturing it.
• Orbus: An albino dwarf beholder with no eyes other than the anti-magic central eye but is a powerful spellcaster. They are only seen in the Spelljammer setting on beholder ships, which they are bred to power and navigate.

Other

• Beholder mage: when the DM wants the entire party to die horrible deaths but doesn't feel like using rocks. This is a special character class that only true beholders can take, which requires them to remove their anti-magic eye, and whenever they gain a the ability to cast a new level of spells must sacrifice one of their eye powers to turn that eyestalk into a spellstalk which casts spells of that level. At level 10, it's empty eye socket can absorb spells to heal it. All the cheese of a wizard with more spells per day, the ability to blast 10 spells at once at you as free actions, and fucking spontaneous casting. Even munchkins shit their pants in fear when they hear of these things. One of the unholy trinity of fuck off broken PCs that you can technically enter, the others being tainted scholars and Illithid Savants. And that's before you start optimizing the bastard because the fucker can still take ten more levels before becoming epic.
• Beholder Priestess: Sometimes when a beholder city is endangered the Hive Mother will called for help from The Great Mother and will be temporarily granted abilities similar to a cleric. On rare occasions this can also happen to a standard beholder, which will cause it to mutated into a Hive Mother.
• Doomsphere: The ghost of a beholder killed in by a magical explosion that haunts the area where it died. If doomsphere is defeated it will respawn in one day unless the area is exorcised.
• Death Tyrant: Basically, a Beholder lich. Yeah, you're probably fucked.
• Kasharin: A death tyrant beholder that also carries a rotting disease similar to mummy rot.
• Evil Eyes: A beholder that possesses non-standard eye powers and so is especially hated by other beholders.

4th edition

4e made use of quite a few different kinds of beholder, though almost all of them were pretty rapetastic, being made for higher levels. Most kinds of beholders had a Telekinesis Ray that they could use to slide enemies about, though for most that's all they do.

• Gauth - Pretty much the same as old editions, this is the pitiful little baby of the beholder family in 4e, and something you can toss at low-level parties to scare them without killing them. Level 5 Elites that can shoot fire, sleeping rays and exhaustion rays, and immobilise with its central eye.
• Bloodkiss - Another carry-over, and the second-weakest beholder statted, this one got the Undead subtype for some reason (guess they didn't read up and thought it was "just" a beholder vampire). Level 9 Solo Controller that relies on its blood-sucking tentacles to rip up anything in reach, though it also packs a psychic + dazing effect Death Scream attack and can hit people a lot of times.
• Eye of Shadow - Beholders who spent too long in the shadowfell, dissolving into a blot of darkness and hate. Fairly puny (level 12 Elite), but seriously trolling, with blinding rays, thundering rays, freezing rays, and the ability to pull off a "teleport 20 squares and then be invisible" trick.
• Eye of Flame - A beholder that specialises in burninating shit. Central eye gives vulnerability to fire and causes fire attacks to do ongoing, eyestalks blast foes with fire and fear effects. A low-Paragon tier (level 13 Elite) foe.
• Eye of Frost - We got a burn-your-ass beholder, so evidently we need a freezinating beholder. Slightly tougher (1 level higher) than its counterpart. Central eye means cold damage can immobilise those it looks at... weirdly, its got two kinds of freezing rays; one that does a lot of cold damage, one that does less cold damage but freezes your ass solid.
• Beholder Spawn - Baby beholders wanna eat your face, too. Level 15 Minions that can bite or do elemental damage with their eye-rays.
• Death Tyrant - Zombie Eye Tyrants, pretty much. Way weaker than their older namesakes (level 15 Solo). Central eye can strip away necrotic resistance (guess what kind of damage it does most) and slow you, and eyebeams focused on kill-you-dead. Choice is whether it just necrotic damages you to death, petrifies you, makes you die, or makes you die and then come back as a ghoul. Oh, and it has a fear ray too.
• Ghost Beholder - Dead Eye Tyrant who came back as a ghost. A level weaker and only an Elite, but still pretty nasty. Freezing eye rays and the ability to possess and mind control your dudes: not a lot of fun if your Will is shitty.
• Eye Tyrant - Your basic beholder for this edition, and pretty damn nasty (level 19 Solo). Can daze you with its central eye, or use its eyestalks to cause radiant and necrotic damage, put you to sleep, paralyze you, confuse you, terrify you, petrify you, disintegrate you or kill you outright.
• Eye of Chaos - Now we're getting into the big guns. Beholders that have been warped by the abyss, changing their alignment to chaotic evil and making them more similar to demons in their behavior. Level 25 Elites that will drive you almost as crazy as themselves, with the ability to lock you down to at-will powers only with their central eye and hit you with rays of force, blinding, confounding, madness, fear or teleportation.
• Ultimate Tyrant - They ain't fucking kidding when they named this bastard. Level 29 Solo - there are ancient dragons that aren't this nasty! Central eye locks you down, other eyes can drive you mad, unravel you, dissolve you, burn you, freeze you, drag you around, petrify you, disintegrate you, pull you closer or hurl you away.
• Eternal Tyrant - Because even the Ultimate Tyrant isn't ultimate enough. This bastard is an undead version of the Ultimate Tyrant that comes in a pair of linked entities; the Shell, a beholder golem (Level 31 Elite Brute) and the Essence, a hyper-powerful beholder ghost (level 33 Elite Artillery). These assholes are literally god-tier monsters - you had damn well better know what you're doing when you fight an Eternal Tyrant!

5th Edition

5e's first Monster Manual provides three forms of beholder; common beholder (or Eye Tyrant), Death Tyrant, and Spectator. The first two variants are what 5e calls Legendary creatures, meaning they have extra powers in their lairs that they can trigger on Initiative Count 20, certain specific effects mark the regions in which they lair, and they have special Legendary Actions that they can perform outside of the normal turn sequence. Their legendary ego has been given up a serious boost; now, beholders mutate at random just by accidentally thinking too hard, their ego is that overpowering. This is also how they reproduce now: by sleeping and dreaming of other beholders, bending reality in that way.

• Beholder: You know it, you hate it. Challenge level 13. Has its old antimagic cone central eye back, a bite attack for piercing damage, and ten eye rays, of which it can use three each round, rolling randomly to determine which three it has. Charm ray, paralyzing ray, fear ray, slowing ray, enervation ray, telekinetic ray, sleep ray, petrification ray, disintegration ray and death ray. It can burn one of its three legendary actions at the end of another creature's turn to blast somebody with a random eye ray. Its lair effects consist of three options; change a 50ft square up to 120ft distant into slimy difficult terrain, make any walls within 120ft sprout flailing appendages that'll grapple anyone within 10ft who can't beat a DC 15 Strength (Athletics) or Dexterity (Acrobatics) check, or cause an eye to pop up on any solid surface within 60ft that can then shoot a random eye ray at any enemy within its sight. For region effects, they're all fluffy; creatures within 1 mile sometimes feel they're being watched, or minor reality warps that affect inanimate objects (markings changing on a wall, slime coating a statue, etc) pop up whilst the beholder is sleeping. Volo's Guide to Monsters introduced a table of potential alternate eye rays, in case your party was feeling complacent.
• Death Tyrant: A beholder who dreamed of living forever. So it died in its sleep and became an undead beholder skull with ghostly eyes. It trades the antimagic cone for a negative energy cone (creatures can't regain hitpoints, humanoids that die in its area of effect become zombies under the death tyrant's command on the next turn). It has the same eye rays and legendary actions as the beholder. Its lair actions are variants of the beholder's - its grabbing walls are DC 17 and reach into the Ethereal Plane, it creates a 50ft cube of lightly obscured difficult terrain, and it can create a spectral eye at any point within 50ft, which can also target foes on the Ethereal Plane. It has one crunchy regional effect; a creature that is both hostile to the death tyrant and aware of its existence must roll a D20 if it finishes a long rest within 1 mile of the death tyrant's lair. On a 10 or less, it gets zapped with a random eye ray.
• Spectator: A lesser beholder variant with only four eye stalks, conjured from another plane of existence via a ritual that requires four beholder eyestalks as material components. It's only Challenge level 3 and it's Lawful Neutral, rather than the Lawful Evil of the others. It has a Confusion Ray, a Paralyzing Ray, a Fear Ray and a Wounding Ray, and it can magically create all the food and water it needs to sustain itself each day. It's a fool's gambit to attack it with spells thanks to its Spell Reflection reaction, which lets it retarget a spell that missed the spectator, or which forced a save that the spectator passed, against another creature within the spectator's line of sight and that is at least 30 feet from the spectator.
• Beholder Zombie: Much weaker than a living beholder. Loses most of its eye rays and its anti-magic cone.
• Death's Kiss: A Beholder who had nightmares about bleeding out spawns a vampiric tentacle monster, using toothy mouth-stalks to voraciously suck the blood from other creatures. It also bleeds lightning, for some reason. Not as smart as a normal beholder, but for this reason not as egotistical or paranoid. Added in Volo's Guide to Monsters.
• Gauth: A smaller beholder who sometimes shows up if you screw up the ritual to summon a spectator; it's got six eyestalks, four tentacles, and smaller eyes all around its central eye, so it's hard to understand how wizards can get confused when it lies and claims to be the real deal. The issue is that Gauths are magic eaters, sucking the juice from magical items to sustain themselves, so you can see why that makes them pretty piss-poor guards for a wizard's lair. They're weaker than true beholders and also less xenophobic. Also, they explode when you kill them.
• Gazer: A ridiculously adorable and weak little beholder (only Challenge 1/2 - that is, a twenty-sixth of the strength of a true beholder) that is sometimes dreamed into being. They're so amusingly pathetic that even pure beholders often keep them as pets, and they have the same sadistic ego of a full beholder in miniature. Have caused a lot of argument over whether the sidebar on gazer familiars is intended for PCs as well or just for mage NPCs, and if so if house rules should be used to slot them in as Chain Pact warlock familiars, let them take the action to fire their eye-rays, etc.
• Mindwitness: A beholder converted into an illithid-like creature via ceremorphosis. Now that those of you who aren't currently running from your computers in terror have stopped screaming, the end result is less "terrifying perfect marriage of beholder eye-rays with illithid mind rape and the combined egotism of both" and more "quasi-lobotomized docile glorified psionic email server," though still smarter than the average human. Notably, if the illithids and elder brains they serve are slaughtered and they survive, mindwitnesses tend to drift around looking for other psionic creatures to serve, taking on the alignments and worldviews of those they meet, be they kindly flumphs or evil demons. Four of their eyestalks become tentacles, but they have six kinds of eyerays: fear, telekinetic, and slowing rays like those of their normal cousins, but also aversion rays that cause disadvantage on attack rolls, stunning rays that stun creatures, and a psychic ray that just causes a pile of psychic damage.

Similar Monsters

Beholders are not the only monsters that look like floating orbs with eyes.

• Gas Spore: Not a true beholder or beholderkin, but a fungus that resembles a beholder. May have been created by a beholder mage, or may be a fungus that took on the form of the beholder that it fed on, or maybe it's just mundane evolutionary mimicry. Beholders sometimes cultivate them in their cities for defense.
• Thagar: Also known as the Beholdereater, it is a predator that eats beholders. Is a giant orb covered in eyes with several mouths on the ends of stalks. It does not have any eye powers, but it is immune to mind affecting magic and highly resistant to it's body being physically affected by magic, so there isn't much a beholder can do against it.
• Deep spawn: An orb with six large tentacles and several retractable eye stalk. Three of it's tentacles end in mouths, and the other three can wield weapons. It has the ability to give birth to loyal clones of creatures it has previously eaten, making them useful for villains who want to populate their dungeons with a variety of monsters. Relation to beholders unknown.
• Gibbering Orb: An epic version of the Gibbering Mouther. An amorphous orb covered in mouths and eyes, which have eye rays similar to a beholder. Possibly is the common ancestor of beholders and gibbering mouthers, though this would conflict with the belief that the Great Mother created beholders. Fourth edition also introduced the Gibbering Abomination, a middle ground between the mouther and the orb which also eye rays.
• Lurking strangler: These creatures are to beholders what monkeys are to humans. A tiny aberration that looks like a pair of flying eyeballs connected by a cord of muscle. It likes to strangling sleeping enemies to death, and it can put enemies to sleep with one of its two eye rays. Beholders sometimes keep these things as pets.
• Fihyr: A living manifestation of nightmares that forms when a large number of people in an area all have nightmares in one night. It has a roughly spherical body covered in eyes, mouths, and tentacles. No relation to beholders.
• Astral Dreadnought: A huge predator that lives in the Astral Plane that has a single eye with anti-magic abilities similar to a beholder's central eye. Relation to beholders unknown.

Notable Beholders

• Large Luigi, a relatively friendly beholder who works as a barkeep in the Spelljammer setting.
• That beholder head of the thieves' guild who was the first major boss in Baldur's Gate: Dark Alliance
• Another beholder head of another thieves' guild who was the final boss of the first Eye of the Beholder game.
• That funny spectator you kept running into and quasi-befriended in Baldur's Gate II
• That blind death tyrant boss you had to get a special god-killing magic wand to kill in Baldur's Gate II
• That beholder in Dungeons and Dragons: Heroes
• That beholder in Futurama who's there for no apparent reason (was meant to be guarding some passage in the Central Bureaucracy but fell asleep on the job)
• Xanathar, the writer of "Xanathar's guide to everything" and head of Skullport's Thieves' Guild, which includes new options for classes and backgrounds, along with his snide comments running throughout. Apparently he's only one of many beholders to have used the title since the first one seized power. Notable for being one of the few beholders to remotely care for a being other than itself, he really loves his pet goldfish. It is kind of adorable. What he doesn't know is that his beloved goldfish has been replaced several times by the Thieves' Guild since goldfish don't live very long and he would not be happy if he ever found out.

Beholders as Monstergirls

No, you're not dreaming, this is a Beholder in monstergirl form.

This article or section is about Monstergirls (or a monster that is frequently depicted as a Monstergirl), something that /tg/ widely considers to be the purest form of awesome. Expect PROMOTIONS! and /d/elight in equal measure, often with drawfaggotry or writefaggotry to match.

The proof that nothing, ab-so-lu-te-ly nothing is sacred, even Beholders got anthropomorphised into a sexy almost-human female by those irremediably insane weebs. Goddamit, Japan!

Gazers (as they are typically known due to copyright) are often depicted as arrogant, selfish beings that do not hesitate to use their eye ray powers to get what they want. Of course, fitting for a monstergirls setting, their powers are less destructive than that of a D&D Beholder, going more toward charm, hypnotism and mind control.

Still, beholder-girls are a rarity, simply because there's something rather counter-intuitive about turning a floating head full of teeth and eyes into a monstergirl. Perhaps the most well known example of them on /tg/ is the Gazer of the Monster Girl Encyclopedia, whose smug grin currently adorns this section of the page. Described as spiteful and full of themselves, their deepest secret is that this is mostly bluster to cover up feelings of insecurity about their looks. They specialize in hypnotic spells, mostly to brainwash men into falling in love with them.

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