Beholders are (except for some rare occasions) solitary creatures. They're solitary because they're vain and spiteful creatures. They believe that they, as an individual, represent absolute physical and intellectual perfection, and can't stand the presence of other hideous, horribly imperfect creatures. They especially loathe other beholders, since the presence of another of their species is an insult to themselves.
They also really really hate beholderkin. Beholderkin are mutanted versions of this first species. Not sure how they came about, so I'm going to say wizards is probably most likely.
Eyeball beholderkin are the least threatening and weakest of the bunch. Where an actual beholder in a 8-foot creature of hate sporting a mass of eyestalks capable of party-ending magic, the eyeball beholderkin is an 8-inch nothing menacing you with cantrips (and a level one spell). They get used as familiars by wizards. They're on the same level as cats, toads and weasels in that sense.
rilly rilly like this one.
ReplyDeleteI really like this one too.
ReplyDeleteI know your monsters are usually 3.5, but was this the Eyeball's first appearance? Do you know if they were in earlier editions?
As far as I know, they fisrt appeared in the Forgotten Realms in 3.5 I don't know how old Forgotten Realms is, or whether they'd appear in an earlier bestiary.
DeleteLovely picture. I'll be using that as a prop in a game I'm running in a few months :-)
ReplyDelete