Beholder

A Beholder is a fictional monster in the Dungeons & Dragons (D&D) fantasy role-playing game. It resembles a floating orb of flesh with a large fanged mouth, large central eye, and ten small eyestalks on top with deadly magical powers. Appearing in every edition of the game since 1975, beholders are original to D&D, and have become popular villains.

Hateful and xenophobic, beholders dominate weaker creatures as slaves, and eradicate those they cannot enslave, including their own kind - they will engage in violent intra-species conflict with others of their kind who differ even slightly in appearance or ability. Beholders are often found as master villains behind a network of minions, using their abilities and genius intellect to hatch plots and schemes iintending to further their own power.

Beholders are powerfully magical creatures, levitating at will to move around, and with each of their eyes possessing a different magical ability - the main eye projects a cone of anti-magic straight ahead, preventing enemies from casting spells, and the smaller eyestalks each have a different spell-like abilitiy, mainly offensive in nature - causing fear, inflicting harm, and mentally dominating creatures, for example.

Many variant beholder species exist, such as aquatic beholders (eyes of the deep), guardian beholders (spectators), and undead beholders (death tyrants). In addition, some rare beholders can use their eyes for non-standard spell-like abilities; these mutant beholders are often killed or exiled by their peers.