Sane Beholders

carefully laid plans. These creatures have information that a beholder needs or access to items it covets, and thus the beholder seeks to capture, subjugate, and eventually destroy the creature as effi ciently as possible. Examples include humanoids, intelligent undead, mind fl ayers, aboleths, and outsiders with 12 to 16 Hit Dice.

Usable: These creatures pose little threat to a beholder, but they possess useful abilities that a beholder can benefi t from if it can charm them. Examples include goblinoids, giants, grell, neogi, and outsiders with fewer than 12 Hit Dice.

Inferior: These creatures offer nothing of interest to a beholder and are simply annoying. Beholders prefer to enslave or destroy them but don’t normally go out of their way to do so. Examples include elementals, nonintelligent undead, constructs, fey, vermin, and sentient plants.

Inconsequential: These creatures offer nothing to a beholder but a convenient source of food. Examples include animals and magical beasts.

Relations with Other Beholders

A beholder’s typical reaction to encountering another beholder is rage. If possible, the beholder directs its minions to attack the other beholder and kill it, but sometimes this tactic isn’t the best one available. In such a case, the beholder is driven to attack the other beholder personally. Of all creatures, a beholder is perhaps the most invulnerable to others of its kind, due to its antimagic cone. A combat between two beholders is savage and ruthless, especially if the terrain doesn’t allow one an advantage over the other. A beholder that is able to ambush another can end the fi ght quickly. When two beholders meet on equal ground, each rotates quickly enough to keep its enemy in the area of its antimagic cone. Thus, the encounter rapidly degenerates into a frenzied battle of fl ashing teeth and tearing fl esh. Each beholder uses

Flyby Attack to swoop in, bite its enemy, and then retreat to a point where its foe cannot escape its cone of antimagic with a single move action, forcing the foe to take two moves to escape the antimagic or retaliate in a similar swoop-biteretreat tactic. Sometimes, a beholder can use the surrounding terrain to turn the tide of battle in its favor by using its eye rays to attack its enemy indirectly. For example, a beholder could use disintegrate rays to drop trees or cave in a roof on an enemy, or it could use its telekinesis eye ray to hurl objects at its enemy. (If the beholder uses the violent thrust form of telekinesis—that is, using magic only to launch the object, which thereafter moves of its own accord as if it had been thrown—the object maintains its velocity and trajectory even after it enters an antimagic cone.) In the exceedingly rare cases where more than two beholders meet, the resulting melee is proportionally more savage and destructive. Beholders in such a fi ght team up against the one that looks the most unusual. The beholders form groups based on their similar physical features and work together to nullify the others. As each beholder falls, the groups reorganize so that the next most unique-looking beholder is the common target. Not all beholders are insane, solitary creatures with little more on their minds than slaughter. Just as other races have members who simply can’t abide by the rules of their society, so too do beholders have outcasts. From a humanoid viewpoint, these outcasts are the few sane beholders. These creatures maintain a hatred of other beholders, but this is a hatred born of fear rather than intolerance. A sane beholder understands that others of its kind view it as the greatest threat of all, and it seeks out places that other beholders shun. In other words, these beholders live in the societies and cities of other races. Although these beholders might be considered sane, most remain evil to the core. They know that they are objects of fear to other races and take pains to establish their lairs in secret underground chambers below a city. They make use of their charm person and charm monster eye rays to build a small army of loyal minions from the local population, and before long, they establish themselves as the shadowy leaders of new organizations. Many of these groups function as thieves’ guilds, with the beholder running the show behind the scenes or through a carefully selected proxy. Other beholder-driven groups might include religious organizations, bard colleges, wizardly schools, or even the government of a small city. The most common form of organization, of course, is the beholder cult. These cults consist of a single beholder that charms a number of minions, who then take to worshiping the beholder as a deity. Beholders fi nd that being worshiped is an excellent path to self-satisfaction and delight, and they encourage such behavior in their minions. In many cases, a beholder keeps only a few select cult leaders charmed, and these leaders guide and infl uence the main body of the cult. That way, cult members worship the beholder voluntarily, without being coerced into doing so by magic, which beholders fi nd most rewarding. Some beholder cultists go so far as to gouge out a portion of their own forehead and graft in a beholder’s eye during a foul ritual dedicated to the Great Mother. These people become clerics of the Great Mother, after a fashion, even though they themselves are not beholders. Known as ocular adepts, they represent the most devoted, and thus most dangerous, of beholder cultists. Often, an ocular adept runs an entire cult and is allied with a beholder that might not live nearby at all. In some cases, a dozen or more ocular adepts based in as many cities might all follow the same beholder. The beholder selects the location of the most powerful cult as a base of operations and rules the other branches by proxy. The ocular adept is detailed in full in the FORGOTTEN REALMS supplement Faiths & Pantheons, but a sample ocular adept appears in the “Cult of the Hungry Eye” adventure at the end of this chapter. In rare circumstances, sane beholders pool their resources and work together to accomplish a common goal. Such a grouping of beholders is called a beholder cluster and consists of anywhere from two to six of the creatures. Because beholders are asexual and have little need for physical companionship, these clusters are almost always focused on dominating inferior