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Slime

2018-11-16T11:39:56Z

2602:306:B88B:FB60:4821:94D4:D2D0:B658: /* Green Slime */

[[File:The gelatinous green cube by shockbolt.jpg|500px|thumbnail|right|[[Halfling]] [[Rogue]] rolled a 1 to Intelligence...or should it be Wisdom? Or maybe both?]]
The '''Slime''', also known as the '''Ooze''', the '''Gel''', the '''Jelly''', or the '''Goo''', is a humble form of monster that pops up in absolutely ''every'' frigging fantasy setting you can imagine, and even a few science-fiction settings. It is most famous in tabletop games for its many diffuse forms in [[Dungeons & Dragons]] and in videogames for [[/v/|Dragon Quest]] (in which it serves as the mascot and also has a fucking huge array of possible slime-forms), but, like we said, you can find a slime just about everywhere if you look.

Slimes are usually low to middle tier threat levels; they are mindless masses of animate sludge, and some higher-level variants may be made of elemental matter, such as water, "liquid ice", magma, molten steel, etc. They have no culture or higher purposes, they just ooze around eating anything organic they touch and growing bigger until they have to divide. Hardly likely to outwit most adventurers, but many games make them fairly resistant to certain kinds of attack, especially physical ones, so just assuming they're harmless is a good way to get dissolved. One prominent commenter described fighting a slime as "playing a terrifying game of 'guess the immunity'," referencing to the fact that unless you have your appropriate Monster Manuals memorised, you can rarely predict what will kill a slime variety outright. And guessing wrong can sometimes be worse than not trying, because using the ''wrong'' damage type can cause the slime in question to divide. And what they are or are not vulnerable to isn't always consistent between editions.

==Types of slimes and similar monsters==
===Gelatinous Cube===
Perhaps the most notorious slime to come out of the tabletop game field is the gelatinous cube, a D&D monstrosity that takes the form of a huge cube-shaped mass of near-translucent gray or green jelly, perfectly sized for oozing through the typical dungeon corridor as a living, insurmountable barrier. Like the [[Rust Monster]] and [[Owlbear]], it's one of those absurdities that everyone pokes fun at, but which has too much nostalgic fondness from the fanbase for anyone to seriously consider getting rid of it. Later, fortunately, it ''did'' come with a half-assed explanation: wizards breed them as living janitorial services to clean the garbage out of the perfectly-square corridors of their evil dungeons. As it's also mostly-transparent, save for the dissolving bits of armor floating in it like fruit in a jello dessert, walking straight into it only to be engulfed is an occupational hazard for dungeon-delvers.

===Black Pudding===
Has nothing to do with the food called black pudding. Comes in other colors besides black, depending on what environment they are found in. All of the different colors are called Deadly Puddings. It can dissolve organic material and metal. Can split if hit by weapons.

===Grey Ooze===
Can rapidly corrode non magical metal similarly to a Rust Monster, but cannot dissolve stone. Is immune to cold and fire. Can camouflage itself as a puddle of water. In 5th edition they can sometimes develop psychic the ability to use psychic attacks.

===Green Slime===
Green slimes are mostly immobile and are more similar to plants. They can drop on you if you walk under one but can't chase you. Anybody who touches one will eventually turn into one if they are not cured.

===Ochre Jelly===
Similar to a black pudding but somewhat weaker. Only dissolves flesh. Can split if hit by weapons or lightning.

===Crystal Ooze===

===Slithering Tracker===

===Mustard Jelly===

===Olive Slime===

===Slime Creature===

===Stunjelly===

===Bone Ooze===

===Flesh Jelly===

===Reason Stealer===

===Teratomorph===

===Arcane Ooze===

===Living Spell===

===Snowflake Ooze===

===Summoning Ooze===

===Bloodfire Ooze===

===Graveyard Sludge===

===Aballin===

===Bloodbloater===
A tiny aquatic ooze that drinks blood and attacks in swarms. Looks like an oversized cell.

===Flotsam Ooze===
An aquatic ooze with a very sticky body which collects debris.

===Reekmurk===
A huge black aquatic ooze that lives in the depths of the ocean or in underground lakes. Has a vulnerability to sunlight.

===Ethereal Ooze===
An incorporeal ooze from the ethereal plane.

===[[Oblex]]===
Has the ability to create exact copies of anyone it has eaten except for the cord of slime attaching the copies to the oblex.

===Bloodrot===
Not actually a true slime, but is really a form of undead made from the remains of somebody who died by being completely dissolved in acid. Infects people with a magical disease called blood fever that causes the victim to melt into a puddle when they die which the blood rot eats. They can hide inside of the bloodstream of anyone who is infected with blood fever. They can also sense the location of anybody who is infected with blood fever within several miles, so if you escape from a battle with one but are infected then more will be attracted to you. Like many true oozes, it can split apart if hit by slashing or piercing damage.

===[[Juiblex]]===
The demon lord of slimes and oozes.

==[[Monstergirl]]s==
{{Monstergirls}}
Surprisingly, slimes have long been given the [[monstergirls]] treatment; Slime Girls (also known as Goo Girls) are typically not very smart, but very affectionate and horny, and their gelatinous bodies have a ''lot'' of kinky shit they can do in the bedroom. In the more restrained versions a slime will engulf a guy while milking him dry, giving him a full body hug. This frequently results in cum floating around in the slime's body, often going towards a the slime's "heart", a core of a color that contrasts the body that is said to hold the slime's soul. It is often an erogenous zone [[/d/|because of course it is]]. In more extreme cases the slime will also penetrate the guy, engaging in stuff like sounding or fucking him in the ass while he fucks her in the, well, [[Dark Eldar|everywhere is a hole for a Slime]]. There are also a few cases where vore starts to be involved, which would be a bit more true to nature for the slimes of D&D fame.

===MGE Slimes===
The Slime is one of the most profuse species in the [[Monster Girl Encyclopedia]] so far, second only to the [[Succubus]] family in terms of diverse members. The slimes of the MGE were heavily influenced by the slimes of the popular fantasy gaming series "Dragon Quest", with the Slime Queen and Slime Carrier in particular being derived from members of that series' vast array of slimes.

Your standard Slime in the MGE world is a dim-witted, happy-go-lucky aimless drifter that just squiggles around looking for a guy to sex. These stand out mostly via their blue coloration.

The Red Slime, in comparison, is smarter and more aggressive.

The green Bubble Slime has a unique chemical composition that causes her to constantly secrete bubbles of noxious-smelling gas. As a side-effect, she's no longer as sticky and cohesive as other slimes, making her grapples easier to escape. However, her substance is a powerful and addictive aphrodisiac, which eventually leaves her victim dependent upon regular ingestions of her drug-like mass. She was one of the first of the [[grimdark]] mamono.

The purple Dark Slime is an extremely powerful succubus/slime hybrid native to Demon Realms. The only slime-girl in the MGE with a core (thus far), they're also smart and predatory; they have the unique ability to corrupt human women, transforming them into new Dark Slimes, via a process that basically involves enveloping the women in their body, orgasmically digesting her alive, and then reforming her as a new slime.

Slime Queens are sometimes mistaken for normal slimes due to their being the same blue color. These slimes suffer a mutation that renders them incapable of physically dividing to reproduce like a normal slime; instead, they swell to massive proportions, and can manifest multiple slimegirl "bodies" from their central mass as they see fit, all of which are, of course, extensions of the slime's singular mind. The bigger she grows, the smarter she becomes. Kenkou Cross has asserted that there are actually Slime Queen variants for all of the standard slimes.

Sea Slimes are jellyfish-girls who live in the ocean, and so lack the shapeshifting prowess of their standard cousins.

Nureonagos are a Zipangu breed of slime whose name comes from a yokai that manifested as a soaking wet girl who comes wandering around on rainy nights. The Nureonago mamono is a slime with especially advanced mimicry abilities, allowing her to take the form of a solid human girl in clothes - but she can't deny her nature, and so always looks soaking wet.

Likewise, the Shoggoth is a slime-girl maid who specializes in shapeshifting, specifically in extruding pseudopods and shaping them into tools to help her do her various chores.

The Parasite Slime is a slime that can't take on a slime-girl form of its own, instead attacking human women and raping them until their mind breaks before using them as lures to attract human men to be their partners, turning them into the mindless fuck-puppets called "Slime Carriers". This is one of the two slimes that compete for the title of "most fucked-up mamono in the MGE".

The Humpty Egg is the ''other'' slime contender. See, in the region of the MGE world known as "Wonderland", there's a super-horny, busty and fluffy [[harpy]] species caled the Jubjub Bird. These harpies lay eggs, and if a man gets too close to an unhatched egg, there is a good chance that the unborn chick inside will become aware of his spiritual energies and react by ''bursting out of her shell as a horny [[loli]] slime-girl made of egg-guts'', essential aborting herself to have sex faster. Consisting of a [[loli]] made up of goopy, semi-solid egg-yolk and surrounded by a malleable mass of egg-white they use to form the traditional slime pseudopods. These slimes actually lay eggs when they get pregnant, which usually hatch into new Jubjubs, but are more likely than "normal" Jubjub eggs to turn into Humpty Eggs. This species was met with considerable outcry when it was released, with even many [[loli]] fans going "seriously, dude, this is going too far!"

===Gallery===
<center>
<gallery>
File:MGE Slime.jpg|A normal slime.
File:MGE Red Slime.jpg|A red slime.
File:MGE Bubble Slime.jpg|A bubble slime.
File:MGE Dark Slime.jpg|A dark slime.
File:MGE Slime Queen.jpg|A Slime Queen.
File:MGE Shoggoth.jpg|A [[Shoggoth]].
File:MGE Nureonago.jpg|A Nurenago.
</gallery>
</center>

[[Category:Dungeons & Dragons]][[Category: Monsters]]

Beholder

2018-11-16T10:49:33Z

2602:306:B88B:FB60:4821:94D4:D2D0:B658:

[[Category:Dungeons & Dragons]][[Category:Monsters]]
[[Image:Beholder_balloon.jpg|thumb|right|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 [[Illithid|Mind Flayer]]s, are considered "intellectual property" of <s>TSR</s> 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 [[OGL|Open Gaming License]]. This naturally doesn't stop [[ChapterHouse Studios|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 [[Heroes of Might and Magic|THE GAME. THE LEGEND.]]

==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 [[Imperium|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 [[Doctor Who|Dalek]].

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.

==Notable Variants==
===2nd & 3rd Edition===
* Gauth: basically, babby's first beholder, with only 6 eyestalks of doom and a reduced ability to disintegrate everyone.
* Eyeball: tiny beholder, best used as a familiar. Pretty damn adorable for a beholder, still Neutral Evil.
* Death Tyrant: basically, a Beholder lich. Yeah, you're probably fucked.
* Death Kiss: instead of dispensing death-beams from its eyestalks, they use them to suck your blood.
* 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.
* Lensman: The lowest of all beholderkin. Looks like a cross between a starfish and a monkey with a single eye in the center, which may have one of six different powers.
* 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 all of them. Can cast the message and tounges spells. They are cowardly and manly act as spies.
* 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 beholderkin. basically a bigger meaner beholder that holds beholders and beholderkin under its sway.
* 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
* Overseer: a beholderkin that looks like a giant fleshy tree trunk with eyestalk branches, tentacles for roots, 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.
* 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 [[Trap|illusion of mermaids]] and other things to lure victims closer.
* Director: a beholderkin with three bottom tentacles that it uses to 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.
* 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.
* Gas Spore: Not a true beholder, but actually a [[fungus]] that resembles a beholder. May have been created by beholder mages, may be a fungus that took on the form of the beholder that it fed on, or maybe it's just mundane evolutionary mimicry.
* Gouger: A beholderkin created to fight beholders. It does not have any eye powers other than the antimagic eye. It attacks with a long barbed tongue which it uses to disable other beholder's eyes. Larger than regular beholders and has four small legs hanging off of their body.

===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 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.
* 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 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Eye of Chaos - Now we're getting into the big guns. 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.

===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: 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 [[Adeptus Astra Telepathica#Astropaths|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 [[flumph]]s or evil [[demon]]s. 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==
* Thagar: A predator that eats beholders. Is a giant orb covered in eyes with several mouths on the ends of stalks. Is immune to mind affecting magic and highly resistant to it's body being 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.
* 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.

==Notable Beholders==
*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|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|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. 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 [[RAGE|not be happy if he ever found out]].

==Beholders as Monstergirls==
[[File:Gazer.jpg|200px|thumb|right|No, you're not dreaming, this is a Beholder in monstergirl form.]]{{Monstergirls}}

[[rule 34|The proof that nothing, ab-so-lu-te-ly nothing is sacred,]] even Beholders got anthropomorphised into a sexy almost-human female by [[/d/|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 [[monstergirl]]s setting, their powers are [[PROMOTIONS|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.

==Gallery==
<center>
<gallery>
File:Awesome Beholder.png
File:The-bard-and-the-beholder.jpg
</gallery>
</center>

Beholder

2018-11-16T10:37:44Z

2602:306:B88B:FB60:4821:94D4:D2D0:B658: /* Notable Variants */

[[Category:Dungeons & Dragons]][[Category:Monsters]]
[[Image:Beholder_balloon.jpg|thumb|right|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 [[Illithid|Mind Flayer]]s, are considered "intellectual property" of <s>TSR</s> 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 [[OGL|Open Gaming License]]. This naturally doesn't stop [[ChapterHouse Studios|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 [[Heroes of Might and Magic|THE GAME. THE LEGEND.]]

==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 [[Imperium|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 [[Doctor Who|Dalek]].

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.

==Notable Variants==
===2nd & 3rd Edition===
* Gauth: basically, babby's first beholder, with only 6 eyestalks of doom and a reduced ability to disintegrate everyone.
* Eyeball: tiny beholder, best used as a familiar. Pretty damn adorable for a beholder, still Neutral Evil.
* Death Tyrant: basically, a Beholder lich. Yeah, you're probably fucked.
* Death Kiss: instead of dispensing death-beams from its eyestalks, they use them to suck your blood.
* 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.
* Lensman: The lowest of all beholderkin. Looks like a cross between a starfish and a monkey with a single eye in the center, which may have one of six different powers.
* 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 all of them. Can cast the message and tounges spells. They are cowardly and manly act as spies.
* 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 beholderkin. basically a bigger meaner beholder that holds beholders and beholderkin under its sway.
* 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
* Overseer: a beholderkin that looks like a giant fleshy tree trunk with eyestalk branches, tentacles for roots, 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.
* 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.
* Director: a beholderkin with three bottom tentacles that it uses to 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.
* 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.
* Gas Spore: Not a true beholder, but actually a [[fungus]] that resembles a beholder. May have been created by beholder mages, may be a fungus that took on the form of the beholder that it fed on, or maybe it's just mundane evolutionary mimicry.
* Gouger: A beholderkin created to fight beholders. It does not have any eye powers other than the antimagic eye. It attacks with a long barbed tongue which it uses to disable other beholder's eyes. Larger than regular beholders and has four small legs hanging off of their body.

===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 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.
* 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 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Eye of Chaos - Now we're getting into the big guns. 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.

===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: 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 [[Adeptus Astra Telepathica#Astropaths|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 [[flumph]]s or evil [[demon]]s. 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==
* Thagar: A predator that eats beholders. Is a giant orb covered in eyes with several mouths on the ends of stalks. Is immune to mind affecting magic and highly resistant to it's body being 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.
* 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.

==Notable Beholders==
*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|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|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. 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 [[RAGE|not be happy if he ever found out]].

==Beholders as Monstergirls==
[[File:Gazer.jpg|200px|thumb|right|No, you're not dreaming, this is a Beholder in monstergirl form.]]{{Monstergirls}}

[[rule 34|The proof that nothing, ab-so-lu-te-ly nothing is sacred,]] even Beholders got anthropomorphised into a sexy almost-human female by [[/d/|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 [[monstergirl]]s setting, their powers are [[PROMOTIONS|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.

==Gallery==
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Beholder

2018-11-16T10:25:14Z

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[[Category:Dungeons & Dragons]][[Category:Monsters]]
[[Image:Beholder_balloon.jpg|thumb|right|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 [[Illithid|Mind Flayer]]s, are considered "intellectual property" of <s>TSR</s> 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 [[OGL|Open Gaming License]]. This naturally doesn't stop [[ChapterHouse Studios|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 [[Heroes of Might and Magic|THE GAME. THE LEGEND.]]

==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 [[Imperium|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 [[Doctor Who|Dalek]].

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.

==Notable Variants==
===2nd & 3rd Edition===
* Gauth: basically, babby's first beholder, with only 6 eyestalks of doom and a reduced ability to disintegrate everyone.
* Eyeball: tiny beholder, best used as a familiar. Pretty damn adorable for a beholder, still Neutral Evil.
* Death Tyrant: basically, a Beholder lich. Yeah, you're probably fucked.
* Death Kiss: instead of dispensing death-beams from its eyestalks, they use them to suck your blood.
* 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.
* Lensman: The lowest of all beholderkin. Looks like a cross between a starfish and a monkey with a single eye in the center, which may have one of six different powers.
* 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 all of them. Can cast the message and tounges spells. They are cowardly and manly act as spies.
* 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 beholderkin. basically a bigger meaner beholder that holds beholders and beholderkin under its sway.
* Spectator: true neutral beholderkin. It's actually pretty swell, as far as beholders go. Remember that one beholder in Baldur's Gate?
* Overseer: a beholderkin that looks like a giant fleshy tree trunk with eyestalk branches, tentacles for roots, 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.
* 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.
* Director: a beholderkin with three bottom tentacles that it uses to 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.
* 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.
* Gas Spore: Not a true beholder, but actually a [[fungus]] that resembles a beholder. May have been created by beholder mages, may be a fungus that took on the form of the beholder that it fed on, or maybe it's just mundane evolutionary mimicry.
* Gouger: A beholderkin created to fight beholders. It does not have any eye powers other than the antimagic eye. It attacks with a long barbed tongue which it uses to disable other beholder's eyes. Larger than regular beholders and has four small legs hanging off of their body.

===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 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.
* 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 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Eye of Chaos - Now we're getting into the big guns. 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.

===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: 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 [[Adeptus Astra Telepathica#Astropaths|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 [[flumph]]s or evil [[demon]]s. 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==
* Thagar: A predator that eats beholders. Is a giant orb covered in eyes with several mouths on the ends of stalks. Is immune to mind affecting magic and highly resistant to it's body being 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.
* 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.

==Notable Beholders==
*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|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|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. 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 [[RAGE|not be happy if he ever found out]].

==Beholders as Monstergirls==
[[File:Gazer.jpg|200px|thumb|right|No, you're not dreaming, this is a Beholder in monstergirl form.]]{{Monstergirls}}

[[rule 34|The proof that nothing, ab-so-lu-te-ly nothing is sacred,]] even Beholders got anthropomorphised into a sexy almost-human female by [[/d/|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 [[monstergirl]]s setting, their powers are [[PROMOTIONS|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.

==Gallery==
<center>
<gallery>
File:Awesome Beholder.png
File:The-bard-and-the-beholder.jpg
</gallery>
</center>

Beholder

2018-11-16T09:45:02Z

2602:306:B88B:FB60:4821:94D4:D2D0:B658: /* 2nd & 3rd Edition */

[[Category:Dungeons & Dragons]][[Category:Monsters]]
[[Image:Beholder_balloon.jpg|thumb|right|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 [[Illithid|Mind Flayer]]s, are considered "intellectual property" of <s>TSR</s> 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 [[OGL|Open Gaming License]]. This naturally doesn't stop [[ChapterHouse Studios|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 [[Heroes of Might and Magic|THE GAME. THE LEGEND.]]

==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 [[Imperium|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 [[Doctor Who|Dalek]].

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.

==Notable Variants==
===2nd & 3rd Edition===
* Gauth: basically, babby's first beholder, with only 6 eyestalks of doom and a reduced ability to disintegrate everyone.
* Eyeball: tiny beholder, best used as a familiar. Pretty damn adorable for a beholder, still Neutral Evil.
* Death Tyrant: basically, a Beholder lich. Yeah, you're probably fucked.
* Death Kiss: instead of dispensing death-beams from its eyestalks, they use them to suck your blood.
* 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.
* Lensman: The lowest of all beholderkin. Looks like a cross between a starfish and a monkey with a single eye in the center, which may have one of six different powers.
* 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 all of them. Can cast the message and tounges spells. They are cowardly and manly act as spies.
* 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 beholderkin. basically a bigger meaner beholder that holds beholders and beholderkin under its sway.
* Spectator: true neutral beholderkin. It's actually pretty swell, as far as beholders go. Remember that one beholder in Baldur's Gate?
* Overseer: a beholderkin that looks like a giant fleshy tree trunk with eyestalk branches, tentacles for roots, 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.
* 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.
* Director: a beholderkin with three bottom tentacles that it uses to 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.
* 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.
* Gas Spore: Not a true beholder, but actually a [[fungus]] that resembles a beholder. May have been created by beholder mages, may be a fungus that took on the form of the beholder that it fed on, or maybe it's just mundane evolutionary mimicry.
* Gouger: A beholderkin created to fight beholders. It does not have any eye powers other than the antimagic eye. It attacks with a long barbed tongue which it uses to disable other beholder's eyes. Larger than regular beholders and has four small legs hanging off of their body.

===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 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.
* 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 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Eye of Chaos - Now we're getting into the big guns. 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.

===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: 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 [[Adeptus Astra Telepathica#Astropaths|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 [[flumph]]s or evil [[demon]]s. 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.

==Notable Beholders==
*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|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|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. 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 [[RAGE|not be happy if he ever found out]].

==Beholders as Monstergirls==
[[File:Gazer.jpg|200px|thumb|right|No, you're not dreaming, this is a Beholder in monstergirl form.]]{{Monstergirls}}

[[rule 34|The proof that nothing, ab-so-lu-te-ly nothing is sacred,]] even Beholders got anthropomorphised into a sexy almost-human female by [[/d/|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 [[monstergirl]]s setting, their powers are [[PROMOTIONS|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.

==Gallery==
<center>
<gallery>
File:Awesome Beholder.png
File:The-bard-and-the-beholder.jpg
</gallery>
</center>

Beholder

2018-11-16T09:40:15Z

2602:306:B88B:FB60:4821:94D4:D2D0:B658: /* Notable Variants */

[[Category:Dungeons & Dragons]][[Category:Monsters]]
[[Image:Beholder_balloon.jpg|thumb|right|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 [[Illithid|Mind Flayer]]s, are considered "intellectual property" of <s>TSR</s> 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 [[OGL|Open Gaming License]]. This naturally doesn't stop [[ChapterHouse Studios|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 [[Heroes of Might and Magic|THE GAME. THE LEGEND.]]

==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 [[Imperium|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 [[Doctor Who|Dalek]].

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.

==Notable Variants==
===2nd & 3rd Edition===
* Gauth: basically, babby's first beholder, with only 6 eyestalks of doom and a reduced ability to disintegrate everyone.
* Eyeball: tiny beholder, best used as a familiar. Pretty damn adorable for a beholder, still Neutral Evil.
* Death Tyrant: basically, a Beholder lich. Yeah, you're probably fucked.
* Death Kiss: instead of dispensing death-beams from its eyestalks, they use them to suck your blood.
* 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.
* 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.
* Lensman: The lowest of all beholderkin. Looks like a cross between a starfish and a monkey with a single eye in the center, which may have one of six different powers.
* 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 all of them. Can cast the message and tounges spells. They are cowardly and manly act as spies.
* Elder Orb: A larger beholder with a much longer than normal lifespan. Always has at least 6 levels of sorcerer.
* Hive Mother/[[Hive Tyrant]]: basically a bigger meaner beholder that holds other beholders and beholderkin under its sway.
* Spectator: true neutral beholderkin. It's actually pretty swell, as far as beholders go. Remember that one beholder in Baldur's Gate?
* Overseer: a beholderkin that looks like a giant fleshy tree trunk with eyestalk branches, tentacles for roots, 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.
* 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.
* Director: a beholderkin with three bottom tentacles that it uses to 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.
* 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.
* Gas Spore: Not a true beholder, but actually a [[fungus]] that resembles a beholder. May have been created by beholder mages, may be a fungus that took on the form of the beholder that it fed on, or maybe it's just mundane evolutionary mimicry.
* Gouger: A beholderkin created to fight beholders. It does not have any eye powers other than the antimagic eye. It attacks with a long barbed tongue which it uses to disable other beholder's eyes. Larger than regular beholders and has four small legs hanging off of their body.

===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 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.
* 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 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Eye of Chaos - Now we're getting into the big guns. 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.

===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: 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 [[Adeptus Astra Telepathica#Astropaths|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 [[flumph]]s or evil [[demon]]s. 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.

==Notable Beholders==
*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|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|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. 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 [[RAGE|not be happy if he ever found out]].

==Beholders as Monstergirls==
[[File:Gazer.jpg|200px|thumb|right|No, you're not dreaming, this is a Beholder in monstergirl form.]]{{Monstergirls}}

[[rule 34|The proof that nothing, ab-so-lu-te-ly nothing is sacred,]] even Beholders got anthropomorphised into a sexy almost-human female by [[/d/|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 [[monstergirl]]s setting, their powers are [[PROMOTIONS|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.

==Gallery==
<center>
<gallery>
File:Awesome Beholder.png
File:The-bard-and-the-beholder.jpg
</gallery>
</center>

Beholder

2018-11-16T09:39:52Z

2602:306:B88B:FB60:4821:94D4:D2D0:B658:

[[Category:Dungeons & Dragons]][[Category:Monsters]]
[[Image:Beholder_balloon.jpg|thumb|right|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 [[Illithid|Mind Flayer]]s, are considered "intellectual property" of <s>TSR</s> 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 [[OGL|Open Gaming License]]. This naturally doesn't stop [[ChapterHouse Studios|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 [[Heroes of Might and Magic|THE GAME. THE LEGEND.]]

==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 [[Imperium|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 [[Doctor Who|Dalek]].

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.

==Notable Variants==
===2nd & 3rd Edition===
* Gauth: basically, babby's first beholder, with only 6 eyestalks of doom and a reduced ability to disintegrate everyone.
* Eyeball: tiny beholder, best used as a familiar. Pretty damn adorable for a beholder, still Neutral Evil.
* Death Tyrant: basically, a Beholder lich. Yeah, you're probably fucked.
* Death Kiss: instead of dispensing death-beams from its eyestalks, they use them to suck your blood.
* 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.
* 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.
* Lensman: The lowest of all beholderkin. Looks like a cross between a starfish and a monkey with a single eye in the center, which may have one of six different powers.
* 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 all of them. Can cast the message and tounges spells. They are cowardly and manly act as spies.
* Elder Orb: A larger beholder with a much longer than normal lifespan. Always has at least 6 levels of sorcerer.
* Hive Mother/[[Hive Tyrant]]: basically a bigger meaner beholder that holds other beholders under its sway.
* Spectator: true neutral beholderkin. It's actually pretty swell, as far as beholders go. Remember that one beholder in Baldur's Gate?
* Overseer: a beholderkin that looks like a giant fleshy tree trunk with eyestalk branches, tentacles for roots, 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.
* 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.
* Director: a beholderkin with three bottom tentacles that it uses to 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.
* 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.
* Gas Spore: Not a true beholder, but actually a [[fungus]] that resembles a beholder. May have been created by beholder mages, may be a fungus that took on the form of the beholder that it fed on, or maybe it's just mundane evolutionary mimicry.
* Gouger: A beholderkin created to fight beholders. It does not have any eye powers other than the antimagic eye. It attacks with a long barbed tongue which it uses to disable other beholder's eyes. Larger than regular beholders and has four small legs hanging off of their body.

===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 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.
* 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 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Eye of Chaos - Now we're getting into the big guns. 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.

===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: 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 [[Adeptus Astra Telepathica#Astropaths|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 [[flumph]]s or evil [[demon]]s. 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.

==Notable Beholders==
*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|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|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. 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 [[RAGE|not be happy if he ever found out]].

==Beholders as Monstergirls==
[[File:Gazer.jpg|200px|thumb|right|No, you're not dreaming, this is a Beholder in monstergirl form.]]{{Monstergirls}}

[[rule 34|The proof that nothing, ab-so-lu-te-ly nothing is sacred,]] even Beholders got anthropomorphised into a sexy almost-human female by [[/d/|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 [[monstergirl]]s setting, their powers are [[PROMOTIONS|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.

==Gallery==
<center>
<gallery>
File:Awesome Beholder.png
File:The-bard-and-the-beholder.jpg
</gallery>
</center>

Beholder

2018-11-16T09:29:53Z

2602:306:B88B:FB60:4821:94D4:D2D0:B658:

[[Category:Dungeons & Dragons]][[Category:Monsters]]
[[Image:Beholder_balloon.jpg|thumb|right|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 [[Illithid|Mind Flayer]]s, are considered "intellectual property" of <s>TSR</s> 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 [[OGL|Open Gaming License]]. This naturally doesn't stop [[ChapterHouse Studios|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 [[Heroes of Might and Magic|THE GAME. THE LEGEND.]]

==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 [[Imperium|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 [[Doctor Who|Dalek]].

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.

==Notable Variants==
===2nd & 3rd Edition===
* Gauth: basically, babby's first beholder, with only 6 eyestalks of doom and a reduced ability to disintegrate everyone.
* Eyeball: tiny beholder, best used as a familiar. Pretty damn adorable for a beholder, still Neutral Evil.
* Death Tyrant: basically, a Beholder lich. Yeah, you're probably fucked.
* Death Kiss: instead of dispensing death-beams from its eyestalks, they use them to suck your blood.
* 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.
* 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.
* Lensman: The lowest of all beholderkin. Looks like a cross between a starfish and a monkey with a single eye in the center, which may have one of six different powers.
* 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 all of them. Can cast the message and tounges spells. They are cowardly and manly act as spies.
* Elder Orb: A larger beholder with a much longer than normal lifespan. Always has at least 6 levels of sorcerer.
* Hive Mother/[[Hive Tyrant]]: basically a bigger meaner beholder that holds other beholders under its sway.
* Spectator: true neutral beholderkin. It's actually pretty swell, as far as beholders go. Remember that one beholder in Baldur's Gate?
* Overseer: a beholderkin that looks like a giant fleshy tree trunk with eyestalk branches, tentacles for roots, 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.
* 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.
* Director: a beholder with three bottom tentacles that it uses to 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.
* 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.
* Gas Spore: Not a true beholder, but actually a [[fungus]] that resembles a beholder. May have been created by beholder mages, may be a fungus that took on the form of the beholder that it fed on, or maybe it's just mundane evolutionary mimicry.
* Gouger: A beholderkin created to fight beholders. It does not have any eye powers other than the antimagic eye. It attacks with a long barbed tongue which it uses to disable other beholder's eyes. Larger than regular beholders and has four small legs hanging off of their body.

===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 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.
* 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 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.
* 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.
* 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.
* Eye of Chaos - Now we're getting into the big guns. 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.

===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: 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 [[Adeptus Astra Telepathica#Astropaths|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 [[flumph]]s or evil [[demon]]s. 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.

==Notable Beholders==
*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|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|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. 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 [[RAGE|not be happy if he ever found out]].

==Beholders as Monstergirls==
[[File:Gazer.jpg|200px|thumb|right|No, you're not dreaming, this is a Beholder in monstergirl form.]]{{Monstergirls}}

[[rule 34|The proof that nothing, ab-so-lu-te-ly nothing is sacred,]] even Beholders got anthropomorphised into a sexy almost-human female by [[/d/|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 [[monstergirl]]s setting, their powers are [[PROMOTIONS|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.

==Gallery==
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