Chapter 3: The Eye Tyrants
WARNING. The following image shows a graphic depiction of Beholder evolution. Discretion is advised.
Along with the Mind Flayer and the Rust Monster, the Beholder is one of the most iconic D&D monsters - the kind of thing you could build a product identity around. As such they should be worthy of their own in-depth look at their history, culture, and society. Unfortunately, what you get instead is a rip-off of Dragon Magazine monstrous ecology article.
Does anyone else remember this book?
Seriously, if you read the fine print in the beginning of this thing the two Beholder-related resources it mentions are
I, Tyrant and Michael Mearls' "Eye Wares: Potent Powers of the Beholders" from Dragon Magazine #313. They don't even give a shout-out to
Monster Mythology.
...perhaps it's for the best.
Long story short: they're insane (no, really, it's in the book: every beholder is nuts because the left brain and right brain are actually warring for dominance), giant (8-10' in diameter) hermaphroditic floating orbs with multiple magic eyes and giant fang-filled mouths. They eat, shit, and give birth through their mouths.
Beholders are gender neutral, and they become fertile only once in their lives. During this period (which happens within the first forty years of a beholder’s life), the creature grows increasingly more erratic and paranoid in behavior. A strange ovoid organ (6) below the back of the creature’s tongue grows large and swollen; this is the creature’s womb. A typical beholder gestates up to twelve young in its womb over a period of nearly six months, during which time it grows more and more active and cantankerous. A pregnant beholder eats nearly four times its normal amount of food for the first four months of its term, storing up food reserves in its stomach, intestines, and even its lung. During the final two months, the creature’s womb has swollen so large that its mouth becomes incapable of swallowing more food, and its tongue protrudes grossly from
its maw. A beholder is at its most paranoid during this time and remains hidden in its lair until it gives birth.
The birthing of new beholders is a sight that few have witnessed, and by all accounts, it’s something that even fewer would want to witness. When a brood comes to term, a beholder’s jaw unhinges, and it regurgitates its womb out through the mouth. The creature bites the womb off, and it floats gently in the air. The young beholders are forced to chew their way out of the gory mass to freedom; they are capable of flight immediately, but their eye powers develop later in life.
Although a beholder gives birth to up to a dozen young at once, only a handful survive. The parent observes its young and decides which look most like itself. The others are eaten by the ravenous parent, along with the discarded womb, and the surviving young are forced from the parent’s lair within the hour to fend for themselves.
Ah, the miracle of life.
Anyway, the best part of the Beholder ecology and culture was actually developed in the Forgotten Realms. To whit: there are a bunch of different type of Eye Tyrants, and they are all genocidally opposed to one another. Even slight differences cause them to try to exterminate each other, with only special wonky bullshit like Hive Mothers from the Spelljammer setting able to produce anything like cooperation between beholderkin.
But can't you see, I'm half-white and he's half-black!
I actually think the Monster Ecology article route is a fairly solid one for this sort of product - well, better than what the others managed to cobble together, anyway - although I sort of wish they're written a completely new one with something like the Monster Hunter's Association* rather than stealing shit outright. As it is, you get a very truncated look at the major beholder variants, such as the massive Elder Orbs, Hive Mothers, Death Tyrants, and various Beholderkin. Also, they switch from in-character description to out-of-character mechanics and references to
Monsters of Faerun with no warning whatsoever, because fuck you.
* Monster Hunters Association was a long-running series of Monster Ecology articles/fiction from the late AD&D2 era starring the bumbling cast of the MHA, which was divided between well meaning proto-zoologists/researchers and aggressive, greedy self-declared hunters more interested in what a monster corpse could yield. It was all in good fun, and is missed.
Seriously, after several pages of under-the-tongue wombs and descriptions about the hardness of a beholder's skull, the description of the interesting beholderkin is covered in less wordcount than the section on the beholder diet. That's just bad form. The chapter then merrily skips along to re-present the Beholder Mage class, slightly revised for D&D3.5.
Now here's the thing about the normal beholder: it has ten eyestalks, each of which has a magical ray-power associated with it, and the central eye shines an antimagic cone which is basically "fuck you, adeventurers." The Beholder
Mage, on the other hand, has learned to channel arcane magic through its eyestalks by putting out the central eye. So the entire point of the Beholder Mage is to give this floating death the powers of an archmage. It was a big thing among the select group that cared about this shit back in the day, because a beholder mage even became Magister once (fuck you very much, Mr. Greenwood.) But the point is that the Beholder Mage was originally presented as the
only way for an Eye Tyrant to cast magic spells instead of eye rays, because they had no hands to do somantic or material components.
This prestige class is, then, somewhat diminished in D&D3 because on the very same fucking page they have an example character Elder Orb that's also a 16th level sorcerer. I don't know how the fuck that's supposed to work, because while it has the Eschew Materials it doesn't have Still Spell or anything and some of its known spells require Focus and Somatic components - what the fuck is it supposed to do, wave its eye-stalks and make faces?
Anyway, the Beholder Mage prestige class is still insane. Nominally only open to "true beholders," that's a very low bar for most PCs to get around if they want to. It's a ten level prestige class where you gain a new spell level about every level, basically making sorcerers cry all the while. It easily features as one of the most broken classes in the game, and that's saying something.
After this we get a few beholder feats (also open to beholderkin, and sometimes just having appropriate monstrous characteristics). There's a couple things here that are interesting, but so specific that there's not much call for them: Disintegration Finesse lets you use
disintegration on the "fine" setting, so that you can lower damage, select which parts of the target to disintegrate, use it to carve, etc. Not a lot of call for that, really. Skilled Telekinetic lets the user with Telekinesis (Su) trigger a command word, spell completion, or spell trigger magic item, which is a great trick when you want to read a scroll in the bad guy's pouch. There's a two-step feat chain that culminates in Disjunction Ray, letting a beholder use
Mordenkainen's disjunction.
Beholders avoid using this narrowed ray on magic items since the destruction of a magic item also destroys a potential source of magic that could be used to charge their dweomer-lobes.
Right! Dweomer-lobes. Totally forgot about those. Yeah, although completely uncredited, they ripped off a lot of the beholder anatomy from Ed Greenwood, who reasoned that the reason beholders cached magic goodies they couldn't use is because they fed off the magic. This doesn't make a lot of sense, but any use of the word "dweomer" is a dead giveaway that he's had a hand in it somewhere.
The Metaray feat requires a bit of background. One of the hallmarks of D&D3 were metamagic feats. Before this, many players and designers recognized a desire for metamagic (if nothing else, to cut down on the "greater" and "lesser" spells) but had a very difficult time on implementation in AD&D - there were metamagic spells, and various magic items, and the Language of Magic from the
College of Wizardry supplement which strongly influenced D&D3, and of course Ed Greenwood's weird Incantatrix nonsense. But whereas the initial spate of metamagic feats in the
Player's Handbook are pretty well together, the game kind of ran into an issue with applying them to spell-like and supernatural abilities in the
Monster Manual. Now obviously they
wanted to do this, but the basic trade-off of higher spell slots in exchange for greater utility wasn't feasible when applied to a monster that didn't
use spell slots. No-one was really happy with the result, which is why they kept having other goes at it - like the Metashadow feats in
Tome of Magic - and like the Metaray feat here.
So basically, the Metaray feat allows a beholder or beholderkin to apply a metamagic feat it knows to one of its eye-rays once a round, at the cost of burning out that eye ray for a number of rounds equal to the increase in spell level. That's
not bad as far as these things go; it's more of a trade-off than your straight Empower Spell-Like Ability, and there are some interesting things you can possibly do with it when you use stuff like Energy Substitution or Fell Animate (beholder necromancers for the win!) However, it requires taking at least two feats (a metamagic feat and Metaray) and is kind of wasted on the floating ball of death, which is already generally considered deadly enough. As a trick it's interesting, but how many beholder villains do you get in a campaign? It's not like PC beholders are going to be common, either. I'd love to have somebody run an Eyeball Beholderkin PC, but their eyestalk abilities are so weak that I'm afraid Metaray would be quite useless.
The next subsection is Beholder Magic, by which they mean beholder magic items, by which they mean Mike Mearls' version of magic items combined with some stuff Ed Greenwood came up with like the mouthpick.
Because sometimes a giant floating orb of death wants to hold a sword in its jaws and stab
you to death.
The major benefit of this section is making clear what magic item slots a giant floating orb has, as the bulk of the magic items are various "lenses" that are essentially metamagic items for eyerays. This makes me sad, because I'd kind of like to see the magic items
made from beholders, like that floating hollowed-up beholder used as a vehicle by gnomes.
Now, finally, we get to Beholder Society. I don't know why it's here, after the game mechanics. It doesn't cover much; they worship the Great Mother, speak Common but have their own language, don't often befriend each other, hate anything they can't eat or zap, and are pretty much genocidal toward each other. There's a lengthy column on the rare Sane Beholders, which makes me sad because it really would have been better replaced with more than the paltry paragraphs the beholderkin got.
For reasons unknown, the "Sane Beholders" column really spends 9/10 of its time talking about Beholder Cults. These are, you guessed it, cults of humans or humanoids that worship beholders. Because why not?
Seems legit.
Unfortunately, this doesn't include the
Sphere Minion.
Beholders have cities, mainly in Spelljammer and the Forgotten Realms because everyone else realized that jamming a bunch of high-CR apex predators that want to kill everything that doesn't look like them (including each other!) into a small space is a Bad Idea. Seriously, when are you ever going to
visit a beholder hive? Never. You're never going to do that. It's like infiltrating an Illithid city, you're just never going to fuck about with that while you have other options. Beholder hives are high-grade mind caulk for gamemasters and game designers.
Despite the name "city," what this basically amounts to is one hive mother and about 50-80 assorted beholders and beholderkin, with a little over twice that number of slaves. I'm pretty sure Ed Greenwood has bigger ones, but the Forgotten Realms as we knew it is long gone anyway so no-one cares.
There's a sidebar (well, bottom-bar) on page 49 asking "Why don't the beholder disintegrate the world?" There really isn't a good answer to that, but according to Mearls it's because otherwise they wouldn't have any challenge in their life.
About a page is spent on minions of beholders, mostly kept around using their
charm eyestalks. I guess that's as good a way as any to become a boss monster, but it's about up there with interspecies beholder erotica as far as general utility.
His name is Bob. His girlfriend is a goblin.
Then we get the lair of a typical beholder, Sekarvu. This is a bit like including an example dragon cave, in that this is basically a short high-level dungeon crawl all on its lonesome. It's a collection of natural caverns connected by
disintegrate-bored holes you pretty much need to be a giant floating eyeball to navigate easily, so it's not exactly
inviting if the PCs just run across it - break out the ropes and crampons, kids! - and I'm not entirely sure why it needs a lair
per se, but as these things go it's not
bad. I don't normally see the need to drop a mini-dungeon for 15th level adventurers into the game, but if I did this wouldn't be a poor choice.
Following this is
another encounter set-piece, the Cult of the Hungry Eye - yes, a beholder cult - which has a chapel and stables and everything, though no actual beholder in residence, just the head cultist, a drow bard 6/fighter 2/ocular adept 4. Ocular Adepts are a new prestige class introduced in the back of the book, although I don't know why since they'd make much more fucking sense in this chapter with all the beholder-stuff, but then I didn't write the fucking thing.
Next up: The Mindflayers!
