#Dungeons and dragons beholder types full

As far as we can tell, beyond the Death Ray save table, that is the only spot in the Original Dungeons & Dragons box set that has anything to do with Death Rays. Luckily, if you opened up the Dungeons & Dragons Boxed Set (1974) and went to the first book, Men & Magic and then stumble upon the Finger of Death spell, it clarifies that it acts like a Death Ray. One of the hardest to locate, we assume for most DMs, was figuring out what a Death Ray did.

A couple, however, don’t correspond directly to a spell of the same name, so the DM had to figure out what to do. It’s worth noting a few things about the various abilities the eyes have, most of them are based on the spell by the same name, and finding out what it does is straightforward. In this edition, it can fire off 1d4 eyes per round. It’s unclear what happens if you kill the body first, does the Beholder just drift aimlessly in the air or does it sink to the ground? Either way, we assume its movement drops to zero and hopefully its eyes stop shooting at you.Īs with all the Beholders, it is the eye rays that make the creature so interesting. That big giant eye in the middle of the beholder makes a nice target and their eyes must be just a squishy as ours. We assume this is due to the stalks being made out of the same “material” as the body itself and that due to how small they are, they are harder to hit. The main eye can take up to 20 points of damage and has an Armor Class of 7, while the eyestalks have the lowest amount of sitting at only 10 HP, though they have an Armor Class of 2. The body has the most at 40 HP and an Armor Class of 0. The body, the main eye, and the eyestalks each have their different armor classes and hit points. Going back to the mechanics of the Beholder, it has three components that make up this monster. Now, it truly is a fearsome battle to the death against the Eye Tyrant!

Luckily, the White Box set of Dungeons & Dragons was reprinted in 2013 by WotC and while every book stayed the same, each one got new and awesome cover art. Well, maybe not so much action as a fat balloon looking stoned out of its mind and a warrior unsure if the monster is just a prank or if he is about to be killed. It’s of a ferocious fight between a fighter and a beholder and you can really tell that there are action and heroics involved! We are given a single piece of artwork on them and it is the front cover of the supplement and it is pretty badass. They float very slowly and are known to be neutral with a bent towards chaos. They are 3’ diameter, they have one big ugly eye in the middle of its round body, and ten little stalks with eyes atop it. The Beholder makes its debut in the Greyhawk Supplement (1975) where they are also called Eye Tyrants and Spheres of Many Eyes - both monikers are apt titles for the creature. The Beholder has a wealth of information and history behind it, and this is going to be a deep and long look into their history.

From the giant Elder Orb, a massive Beholder skilled in the art of arcane magic, to the Doomsphere, an undead beholder created from the energy of powerful explosions to many other strange forms. With over 20 variants of the Beholder throughout the editions, the floating eyeball of doom brings with it a long and storied history. That alone would scare off most reasonable people, and then you find out that the eyes can all shoot rays of various magic at you and your friends, all sane people will flee as quickly as possible.

#Dungeons and dragons beholder types full

This monster is a floating sphere with a giant eyeball in the center, a mouth full of teeth, and little eyestalks on the top of it. There is no myth or legend that the Beholder is born from and is solely a creation from the minds of these gentlemen, which just makes you wonder how many drugs they were doing. One of the original monsters in Dungeons and Dragons, this creature comes from the minds of the creators of the game, Rob Kuntz and Gary Gygax - though the creature was imagined by Rob’s brother Theron Kuntz, and fleshed out by Gygax.