Beholder

Origins

Nothing in mythology looks like a beholder. Folklore has plenty of single-eyed giants and many-eyed watchers, from the Cyclops of The Odyssey to hundred-eyed Argus, but the beholder is not modeled on any of them. It was invented at a gaming table in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, in the years when Gary Gygax's Castle Greyhawk campaign had grown to more than twenty players (see World of Greyhawk). One of them was Terry Kuntz, the younger brother of Rob Kuntz, Gygax's co-Dungeon Master. Terry came up with the creature; Gygax wrote it up for print.

The result appeared in 1975 in Supplement I: Greyhawk, the first expansion of Dungeons & Dragons, and on its cover. The text called it a "Sphere of Many Eyes" or "Eye Tyrant": a floating globe with one large central eye and ten smaller eyes on stalks, each with its own magical power. Players soon learned what those powers were: charm, sleep, petrifying flesh to stone, disintegration, death. The central eye cancels magic in a cone, which makes the monster a direct counter to the party's spellcasters. Commentators have noted that the design seems built to test every member of the party at once.

Into the dungeon

The Monster Manual of 1977, the first book of Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, described the beholder as "hateful, aggressive, avaricious" and most often found underground. Tom Wham drew it as a round, fairly soft-looking ball; one later German reviewer said it looked like "a cuddly rosy ball with too many eyes." Later, TSR artist Keith Parkinson gave the beholder armored plates and jointed, insect-like eyestalks, and that became the standard design. In 1983 Dragon #76 (The Strategic Review & Dragon) published "The Ecology of the Beholder" by Ed Greenwood and Roger E. Moore. Greenwood's Forgotten Realms gave the species its most famous individual: the Xanathar, a beholder who runs the thieves' guild beneath Waterdeep, first described in FR1: Waterdeep and the North (1987).

Four years later the Xanathar became the villain of Westwood's Eye of the Beholder (1991), published by SSI, whose looming beholder cover art Computer Gaming World readers voted best advertisement. That game made the creature a symbol of computer RPGs as much as tabletop ones. Beholders appear among the high-level enemies of BioWare's Baldur's Gate II (2000) and in Capcom's arcade Tower of Doom. Other companies borrowed the idea under other names. Square's original Final Fantasy (1987) included a beholder, which was renamed "Evil Eye" and redrawn for its North American release to avoid trouble with TSR. Heroes of Might and Magic III (1999) fields "Beholders" that upgrade into "Evil Eyes."

When Wizards of the Coast opened the third-edition rules under the Open Game License in 2000, it withheld the beholder as Product Identity. As a result, the beholder is officially available only in D&D. The fifth edition Monster Manual (2014) puts one on its cover, and Xanathar's Guide to Everything (2017) is presented as the notes of that same Waterdeep crime lord.

Variations

Beholders are notoriously xenophobic in the fiction, and the designers made the most of it. In the Spelljammer setting (1989), Jeff Grubb introduced several differently designed beholder nations in space that fight a war over "purity." According to Grubb, this happened because he liked every one of Jim Holloway's competing ship designs and needed a reason to keep them all. The supplement I, Tyrant (1996) and later Lords of Madness (2005) added a religion, the Great Mother, and a wider family of relatives: gauths, spectators, observers, hive mothers, the undead death tyrant and the tiny, drifting gazer. Eberron made beholders servants of the alien daelkyr, and the Epic Level Handbook (2002) introduced a "gibbering orb" as a supposed common ancestor.

Over fifty years the beholder has been a movie cameo, a theme-park puppet built by Jim Henson's Creature Shop, and a benchmark for other monster designers. Few creatures show as clearly how D&D turned from borrowing monsters to inventing them.