Beholders 5e
Guide by Sam West, @CrierKobold
See also: Death Kiss, Death Tyrant, Gazer, Spectator, the Xanathar
When I think “iconic D&D monster” before I think of an Illithid or Aboleth, before I reach for the unique giants of the system or the list of fiends that confront the heroes, Beholders are where my mind goes after I shoo away the red dragon that sits in the system’s name. If the game wasn’t called Dungeons & Dragons, I’d advocate for “Beholders and Bad Choices”.
Beholders are weird, floating eyes that are slow and despicable. They’re vile. Truly awful megalomaniacal monsters hellbent on being the only thing alive around them that spawn from bizarre dreams and come with a suite of unique elements that make them a blast to run and fight.
This guide is everything you could need to start rolling with beholders. Let's take a peek at what makes these tentacle-ridden eye orbs so iconic.
Beholder Resources
If you’re in the market for more aberration goodness to behold, you can find great lore expansions and bonus stat blocks for these monsters and their kin in the Monster Manual and Volo’s Guide to Monsters, and information on one specific Beholder, the Xanathar, in Xanathar’s Guide to Everything and Waterdeep: Dragon Heist.
Basics of Running a Beholder
Two major components set beholders up as unique challenges: their eye beams and giant anti-magic cone. These two gimmicks set them up to catch unsuspecting parties with their pants down and put them in between a rock and a hard place. Being in the antimagic cone shuts down any magic they’d bring against a horrific aberration like this while being outside the cone puts you at risk of getting blown to bits by lasers.
These two defining features paired with their slow hover speed make Beholders a fantastic “big bad”. They’re not going anywhere quickly, and have a wide assortment of tools to challenge a variety of players given enough lair or legendary actions. These encounters tend to end in kill or be killed, and with some unlucky rolls can result in a total party kill.
Tier and Player Levels
These CR 13 or 14 in lair monsters, according to the CR calculators, are Hard for a group of four level 10 characters. Generally speaking, any single monster as a threat will struggle to take down groups with even a minimal amount of strategy based on the action disadvantage it's at.
Damage Taken and Dealt
A different way to look at it is how much damage you expect your party to be able to take, and how much they dish out. Parties that are regularly dealing 45 or more damage per round will take one of these things down in just four rounds. There are many characters who can put out that kind of damage, so without road bumps, escape routes, or other hazards, beholders are in danger of getting steamrolled alone.
Because all of its damage is tied to its eye beams, and only three of the ten outcomes result in damage from 8d8 to 10d10, I’d expect them to only deal between 40-55 damage per round, with a few round outliers of no damage and two instances of this damage. Parties going in with each player having more than this floor HP will do just fine against it, which can occur as early as 7th or 8th level. This is even more so should they have ample access to cheap healing like Healing Word or Goodberry with summoned companions.
Highly strategic encounters with these things will jack the challenge up substantially and will increase the duration of the fight dramatically. The more complexity, traps, and supporting monsters you want to mix in, the higher level you probably should expect players to be.
Basically, figure out how much average damage you’d expect your players to deal and take per round, then check against the 180 hit points and 50ish damage they deal per round.
Tactics of Antimagic
Mechanically, at the start of each of its turns, it picks a region and sticks the cone there. It can then freely move its eye around to see other things having set the field to that specific area for the round.
Beholders can use this in tight, narrow spaces best, specifically when it can split their adversaries on either half. Having a wizard and cleric stuck on one side of a narrow space without great tools to move out of a set area of antimagic can open up opportunities for the eyebeams to flay whoever isn’t within the antimagic.
Another critical element of antimagic presented here is it completely removes summoned creatures within the space. This can take busted spells like Conjure Minor Elementals or Summon Beast and shut off the support as long as it likes, which can be a great countermeasure should Conjure Animals be a tool you’re a bit tired of watching your players lean on to win encounters.
Using the Eye Beams
The random eye beams vary in power, but because you reroll duplicates, three of the ten outcomes each round will occur. Less than a 3rd of the beams actually deal damage (Death, Disintegration, and Enervation), meaning each target is likely getting hit with some kind of condition ranging from instantaneous paralysis.
Compared to its alternative options, it's nearly always correct to use the beams when able over biting. Biting is 4d6 damage to one target for its entire turn- the beams are almost always going to have a bigger impact than that.
This makes beholders function in bursts of damage, but usually to only one target per round. The rest of their kit’s job is to stall. Combined with the antimagic cone, you’re aiming to keep three players targetable with beams and use the cone against the target most affected by it round to round.
What this also means is that beholders are surprisingly non-lethal encounters. It takes a while for a beholder to take out an entire party’s worth of hit points off just its rays alone; it ends up functioning better with supporting traps or allies, which leads us to…
Lair Action Options
The lair actions presented upgrade the utility primarily of the beholder’s antimagic cone. Difficult terrain can make it impossible for a creature to reasonably escape the cone on its turn when caught there; this can debilitate some characters and isn’t considered magical for the cone itself.
Against larger parties, the bonus eye beam can majorly improve the challenge of the beholder round to round. Four beams per round is a substantial improvement against groups of six or seven compared to the three, as debilitating another character can shift action economy closer to favoring the beholder.
The final option plays best in the tight environments beholders want to play in; grappling creatures near walls helps keep them at a safe distance away from it, and functions best against the martial characters who’d prefer to be in the antimagic cone to avoid the eye beams.
All three are relevant abilities. Tactically, the fourth beam is going to perform best in a vacuum, but circumstantially you can leverage the difficult terrain and wall tentacles to waste party members’ turns.
Mentality and Tactics
Given that its Bite attack is comparatively terrible, Beholders want to maintain as great a distance from its enemies as possible. Its hover speed makes it thrive in narrow, vertical environments that are tricky for its foes to navigate, ideally, that can deny climbing easily or non-magical flight.
Its lack of damage is a real issue for it; paired with its paranoia, it can be challenging to sensibly add in supplemental monsters to support it. The solution? Traps!
Beholders want to fight on their terms, in their territory. Lining walls with arrow traps it can goad enemies to climb into and setting up boulders that it can drop on charmed or paralyzed foes ups the damage these things will deal while making for a deeply engaging combat. It isn’t just about killing the beholder as fast as possible, but chasing it deeper into its lair and avoiding its traps that are the real means it has to kill you.
Of your trap options, traps that punish creatures that stick together, like explosive runes, counteract a lot of the tactical problems beholders can have. Beholders will want a place to retreat to, and on the way have that path lined with countermeasures for interlopers getting too deep for their liking.
As the Main Antagonist
Given its unique nature, dynamic fight structure, and fundamental presentation as an evil floating paranoid eyeball that fews itself as the apex creation nothing dare challenge, Beholders make spectacular unapologetically evil villains.
Long-term planning and its elitist sense of superiority define Beholders. This often makes them excellent leaders of larger crime organizations, as seen with the Xanathar of Skullport, but also they function great as monsters feeding from a cult. Their followers don’t necessarily know what they’re working for or worshipping, simply that it pays well enough to traffic magical artifacts to it, no questions asked. Beholders can find value in underlings, but almost always at a far distance from them. They’re not going to ever get put in a position to be betrayed.
The creatures that have the privilege of dealing with beholders normally are somebody elses boss as well. Their closest underlings usually are going to have a drive to raise their social status at any cost, even if that involves working with shadowy figures they never personally meet.
Underling Table
| d8 | Underling |
|---|---|
| 1 | A goblin boss leading a troupe of bandits who have usurped their hobgoblin warlord |
| 2 | A band of cultists who believe they're worshipping a dead god |
| 3 | Kobolds who are convinced they’re working for an adult black dragon |
| 4 | Strategically cultivated rust monsters to weaken non-magical adversaries |
| 5 | A nothic leaching power from the bizarre magic of its lair |
| 6 | A reclusive Mind Flayer way in over their head seeking to replace their current boss |
| 7 | Chuul, fed off the corpses of people delving to close to the beholder’s lair |
| 8 | Derro commanded by the beholder in the dreams incapable of remembering who commanded them while awake |
As a Supplementary Monster
Despite their nature and lore, their stats make beholders superb supporting casters for larger evils. The bulk of their actions are dedicated to disabling enemies. Alongside a heavy damage-dealing, primarily martial monster, it can be devastating.
Beholders usually need some adjustment in lore or personality to ever justifiably work under something else. Still, should a storm giant or Kraken capture one, I can envision these making for spectacular supporting “caster-like” creatures showcasing a top-tier, high-CR villain.
Fighting a Beholder
If you’re looking for tactics to use against these monsters, there are some fundamentals to keep in mind without delving into their stat block too deeply to avoid metagaming.
Positioning
Because beholders want to lock down some specific party members with antimagic, yet can’t use eye beams in that area, you can majorly counteract its effectiveness by sticking close together, especially in terms of grouping and alternating between magical and non-magical characters in position. This forces it to either allow your team to cast mostly freely, or limit its targets with its beams to the outermost characters.
Additionally, the nature of cones makes them smaller in area the closer to the center you get. This makes it easier for you to navigate in and out of the antimagic zone should you need to cast. There are next to no risks for being close to this thing; all of its abilities have at least an 120 ft. range. It may be counter-intuitive, but being closer to the floating tendril-ridden eye is usually better for the squishier casters than staying far away and having to waste time dashing around trying to escape its gaze.
Weaknesses to Exploit
Beholders are slow. It's not going to easily get away from groups with diverse natural speeds like climbing or non-magical flight. The core problem, of course, is going to be handling its beams that lock you down. Boons to saves are an easy way to improve your capabilities here, but it will be hard to target it with specific conditional protections, as it has a huge variety of conditions available to it.
If you can physically get on top of it, it's going to have a horrendous time dealing with you.
Spells and Abilities That Shine Against Them
Beholders only come with the prone condition immunity, no damage resistances or immunities, and a horrendous Strength score and mediocre Dexterity. Conditional effects that use either of those save types will make quick work of these.
Spells like Web and Black Tentacles come to mind first, but their anti-magic cone disables them freely, making them ineffective solutions in the long term.
Constitution saves that apply conditions like Blindness/Deafness are pretty solid options as well, namely because it can’t dismiss the Blindness/Deafness on itself with the cone without also disabling all of its eye beams.
Given how much of their challenge is tied to saves, having a Paladin with Aura of Protection is superb. Not only does it reward you for tactically positioning in a way you’d want to against beholders anyway, it reduces the effectiveness of every one of its beams further, all while working great both in and out of the anti-magic zone.
The World Around a Beholder
Beholders require unique adventuring environments to thrive as villains. Their lairs are practically as important as they are, and can range from mundane repurposed vertical wizard towers to bizarre dwellings coated in dream manifestations of otherworldly horror. Creatures near a lair will know something is wrong- whether or not they can find the secret hiding space and confront the source of evil is a bigger question.
Environments and Lairs
Their Regional Effects are wonderfully weird, and not specific to any one region. There still are specific kinds of environments beholders can use defensively better than their foes thanks to their hovering nature.
Swamps are an easy place to start- the mire and muck bog down pedal creatures while they seamlessly float around the space above. These areas also contain natural predators and hazards that can prove devastating when paired with paralysis and other movement impairments beholders can sling out.
Narrow, vertical environments also showcase everything a beholder wants. They can go up and down just as easily as left to right, while adventurers tend to have to work harder to get to them. This can look like twisting underground cave networks or ancient repurposed wizard towers.
The following table has some sample lairs a beholder might make up in a given environment.
Lair Table
| d8 | Lair |
|---|---|
| 1 | Below the surface lies a maze of caves where the beholder has cultivated skirge and other monstrous beasts to hide their hoard of treasures |
| 2 | An abandoned castle half-buried in a swamp repurposed and overrun with traps |
| 3 | The hollowed-out skeleton of a deceased ancient white dragon and its hoard perched atop a glacier with narrow tunnels bored through burg forming a labyrinth |
| 4 | A secret inverted tower below a wizard tower that traffics goods and travels through its Circles of Teleportation under its strict control |
| 5 | A gravity-less series of connected demi-planes magically held together in the Astral Sea the beholder stores captured test subjects to perform magical experiments on |
| 6 | A massive statue in its image with each eye atop its stock being a different room |
| 7 | The ruins of a drow city in the underdark, recently populated, make the space for a Beholder to rule from the stalactites the city is built around |
| 8 | Deep within the sewers resides a beholder too large to now fit back out, forced to carve tunnels deeper and build out its own palace within the filth |
Quest Hooks
Beholders are a menace to the world around them; they tend to be at their most dangerous when other creatures threaten their position atop the hierarchy of the region. Being devious planners with major trust issues, they work through a nesting doll’s worth of lairs to prevent much information from getting out about its true nature.
Early plot hooks often will look innocent enough- a band of brigands robbing merchants, an assassin striking at a noble figure. Patterns may start to emerge that show these events players work to stop are more connected than they first though, many of which point back to a mysterious benefactor with no name, or a dozen fake names.
Their existence can cause problems, too- the world around their lair is polluted by their dreams and inner demons. Quests to seek the source of madness can easily lead to early confrontation with one of these aberrations.
Loot Options
Beholders amass wealth, as any good D&D villain should. Taking inspiration from their core abilities not only gives flavorfully fitting options to your players but also reflects a beholder’s xenophobic need to be the only thing in existence that can do what it does.
Items that reflect both their abilities and their disposition work great for this; the beholder likely isn’t using them, but instead hoarding them so others don’t.
Uncommon Loot Table
| d6 | Item |
|---|---|
| 1 | Cloak of Protection |
| 2 | Deck of Illusions |
| 3 | Driftglobe |
| 4 | Eyes of Charming |
| 5 | Headband of Intellect |
| 6 | Slippers of Spider Climbing |
Rare Loot Table
| d6 | Item |
|---|---|
| 1 | Cape of the Mountebank |
| 2 | Cloak of the Bat |
| 3 | Portable Hole |
| 4 | Ring of Feather Falling |
| 5 | Ring of Free Action |
| 6 | Ring of X-ray Vision |
Very Rare Loot Table
| d4 | Item |
|---|---|
| 1 | Ring of Telekinesis |
| 2 | Rod of Absorption |
| 3 | Rod of Security |
| 4 | Robe of Stars |
A Sight to Behold
And that’s just about everything you could need to know to run beholders! Go out there and make your spookies angry ball of flying eyes you desire, and rend players bit by bit with paralysis, petrification, and ennervation! Thanks for reading!
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