 Howdy how's it going? My name's Davy Chappie and it's time to venture into the lore of the most powerful party balloons in all of Dungeons and Dragons history, the Beholder! I'm gonna talk about the lore of the Beholder from its origins to its daily life and I'm gonna talk about what to do if you end up staring down a Beholder and you just can't see eye to eye and eye and eye and eye and eye and eye. As always keep in mind that a lot of this is just my opinion, so if you feel like I can't fully BEHOLD the power of these creatures, feel free to run your Beholders however you want. But with that out of the way, let's behold. So Beholders are the beloved beach balls of D&D that you bring out whenever you want some fun in the sun. By fun you mean eye lasers, and by sun you mean fucking eye lasers! True, the Beholder's main feature is its anatomy, being the biggest woundest boy in the multiverse and having 10 fun eye stocks that shoot different types of beams that'll all do crazy shit. Beholders use their big beautiful eyes to see in every direction, fire off lasers that'll confuse, charm, freeze, or disintegrate people, stare over bathroom stalls, and blast anyone who bothers them into oblivion. And when I say anyone who bothers them, I can really shorten that sentence to just anyone. Anyone at all may be put in a Beholder's shit list just because Beholders have bouts of megalomania every bit as big as their rotund bodies. So their rampant paranoia turns anyone who can't match the intellect of a giant avocado pit into an enemy faction plotting to pop that bubble and so it must be destroyed. Their paranoia is so great that even when they do acquire a nice repertoire of minions to faithfully serve the big round, Beholders have a tendency to randomly kill off unsuspecting minions just to see if maybe they hit a spy hidden within their ranks. To a Beholder, the whole world is its oyster, and that oyster is bad. Kill it before it eats you. In fact, the whole purpose of a Beholder is just to prove that it is the most powerful being to ever float the face of the earth. And they truly believe it so whole-bodedly that just for a moment their paranoia actually starts to make sense. See, Beholders are true masters of big brain time, meaning that they can think up not just any possible outcome of a situation, but all of them at once, making fighting against them an absolute chore since sneak attacks and secret traps are all but impossible to pull off because a Beholder has absolute Batman levels of foresight against attacks against it and spends all of its time thinking about possible scenarios wherein its enemies might try to pop its bubble of superiority. Literally any bad thing that happens to it has to be the work of an enemy stand. From rats in the kitchen clearly being sent there by a rat lord that is jealous of his food intake to a band of plucky adventurers trying to kill it because just look at it, it's a beholder, it's perfect. Why wouldn't they be jealous? To its food being too cold because the cook who made it is subtly plotting against it in an effort to make the food quality progressively worse and worse so that the chef will have an excuse to add new types of flavoring to the dish but it's not going to be real flavoring, it's just poison, and now a cook has to die. It's because of this thought process that Beholders have to charm their minions into serving them because people don't appreciate being disintegrated normally and Beholders find that as proof of their guilt. The mind of Beholder is so powerful in fact that it's actually what led to Beholders being created in the first place. Now no one's really sure where the very first ones came from but what is known is that when a Beholder goes to sleep, its mind going dormant while its eye stalks continue to scout the world to ensure maximum awareness against assassins. That Beholder may dream of the concept of what a Beholder is meant to be. It dreams of perfection given boisterous wobbly form and the mere act of a Beholder subconsciously thinking of a perfect being that isn't itself creates a fold in the material world. That fold manifests itself with big brain energy of its own and out pops a new Beholder. Such a thing happening is rare but when it does happen, both Beholders look at each other for a quick moment making direct eyes contact before they both attack each other with the force of a thousand beams. Now in most cases this leads to a stalemate as the main eye of a Beholder is an anti-magic field so literally all of their beams are useless and they have no choice but to just float there like a couple of chuckleheads until they either leave on mutually displeased terms or they ram into each other and start fighting. But depending on the type of dream that the Beholder is having, the species of Beholder that's brought into the world might be a little different than normal. For instance, if the Beholder was dreaming of blood during its aforementioned folding of space and the creature created won't be your average run-of-the-mill soccer ball, it will instead be a death kiss that constantly looks to drain everyone's blood so that it will never run out of its own. A Beholder that has its mind addled may dream up a tiny little geyser that could be then kept as a pet and even Goths and spectators come from other planes of existence where the idea of a Beholder is alien to even, well, aliens. Finally, if a Beholder manages to live an exorbitant amount of time and spends enough of that time speculating on the concept of its own death, then that Beholder has a chance of shaking its normal basketbally shackles and evolving into a greater form, a moldy undead basketball that is way harder to kill and yet still fears Michael Jordan. And that leads us to the most important bit of this whole guide, the part that you would-be Spedungeoners will need if there's ever a time that you come in contact with the eye of the Beholders and that is tactics to survive the ball game. So, picture this with me for a moment. You messed up, you somehow got roped into a plot to defeat a Beholder or maybe you just ended up on the wrong side of the eyelashes and now it wants you dead for one reason or all the others. In either case, your options depend largely on the situation at hand. First off, you can run. Running is a beautiful thing that Beholders can only dream of because they don't have legs. Actually, on second thought, maybe it's better that they don't dream about that. But the point is that Beholders are actually super slow and they can't keep up with you if you make a tactical retreat all the way back to the tavern that you crawled out of. In most circumstances, this is what I would advise and Beholders tend to not care about fleeing enemies as much as non-fleeing enemies just because they see it as an understood fact that they're superior and so people running away is just sort of what they're supposed to do. Just make sure that you either run pretty far or that you run at least further than all of your friends because those beams have an absolute range of ouch. Now, there may come scenarios where you are either unable or unwilling to do the smart thing and leave that massive orb of girthiness alone and in this case your options are limited unless your level happens to be high enough where you can just brute force your way through everything. See, in combat, a Beholder has three main advantages going for it that make it a chore for parties to handle. Firstly, Beholders can fly, meaning melee characters either have to get really swollen the legs or they have to find a way to float up to spike that ball back into the tennis court. Knocking them out doesn't work because it'll just keep floating in place and knocking them prone doesn't work because they are literally a ball and trying to weigh it down is practically impossible because it is a ball. How do you even push it? It will just roll. Now, assuming that you can deal with the flying problem, don't rely on magic to keep you in the game as the main big eye of the Beholder is once again a giant anti-magic cone so at least one caster is just going to be shut down at a given time. Finally, all of those eye beams will shoot independently of the main Beholder as in it can split its mind in a million different ways to worry about all of its problems at once so overwhelming it isn't even possible it's just too round. That means that it'll prioritize whatever beam it wants to solve whichever problems are bothering it at the time i.e. you and these beams come in all sorts of different flavors such as charming, paralyzing, fearing, slowing, innervationing, telekineticing, sleeping, petrificationing, disintegrating, and deathing. So as long as none of those things are a problem for you, you'll be fine. But there is still hope for those poor unfortunate souls who find themselves within the radius of the great round one and that is to stay out of its line of sight. I know that's sort of obvious but it may not be obvious enough that absolutely none of its abilities can work if it can't actually see you well enough to fire its beams. Now that does not mean fight it in the dark. Beholders can see in darkness twice as far as most other dark dwellers and sense it can float. It'll just stay out of sight of most enemies and rain beamy hell down onto its unsuspecting opponents. But if you can manage to turn invisible via magical means then as long as you don't get within sight of that big main eye that'll turn off your magic invisibility then you should be able to do something in the way of strategy. Of course different types of beholders are different either via a number of eyes or in weird special powers that an individual beholder cousin might possess. So I really can't stress that the best way to fight a beholder is to not fight one at all lest you be dunked on by some giant balls. But that'll about do it. I hope you enjoyed this video. Leave a like, comment, subscribe, ring the bell, join my Patreon so that Big Davy is always watching, and if you want the real secret to defeating a beholder it's contact lenses. Beholders don't have hands, it's the perfect plan. But yeah, Davy out.