Beholders

Stalking through a dungeon in search of treasure, you turn a corner and come face to face with a floating mass of flesh, a great eye in the center, and a dozen smaller eyes on stalks, each staring you down.

You are facing a beholder, an alien, intelligent, and extremely hostile creature,

determined and fully capable of senior destruction. Well, perhaps not the most iconic monster

in Dungeons of Dragons, that honor of course belonging to the dragons, the image of a

beholder has become synonymous with D&D, and is one of the few creatures that Wiz, of course, belonging to the dragons, the image of a beholder has become synonymous

with D&D, and is one of the few creatures that Wizards of the Coast does not allow others

to freely use.

Beholders are one of the oldest creatures in D&D's publication history, and are one of the

first monsters to be uniquely created for D&D, instead of being borrowed or recreated from some other source.

Let's look first at their out-of-universe history and then see why exactly beholders are so fearsome.

Beholders were introduced in the Greyhawk supplement for original D&D, released in 1975,

only a year after the release of the original game.

Although Gary Gygax detailed the beholder for the supplement, its original creator was Rob Kuntz's brother, Terry Kuntz.

The Beholder was already important enough to be shown on the cover of the Greyhawk

supplement, and its image would also be used on the covers of the AD&D 2nd edition

Monstrous Compendium and the 5th edition Monster Manual.

It would of course go on to be featured in every edition of AD&D, along with a large number of beholder variants presented in other monster manuals and supplements.

Beholders feature prominently in the outer space adventures of the spell jammer setting, but we'll maybe save that for another time.

There have been countless modules written featuring Beholders, sometimes as a mere obstacle

in the adventurer's path, albeit a powerful one, or sometimes as the primary villain.

Undoubtedly, the greatest source of information about Beholders is the book I Tyrant, written

...