Complete Guide to Beholders, The

[Messageboard Golem]

Behold: the ultimate resource for the ultimate monster. With enough material to sustain a campaign for years, the Complete Guide to Beholders offers a completely new perspective on this misunderstood monster. Far more than simply a book of new options, this work is a transformation of the beholder. It expands their social structure and cultural life in new ways, forever changing the way you play them. Inside you will find:

A comprehensive look at the different varieties of beholders, including the nation-like Dominions by which they separate themselves, the differing ideologies of each Dominion, and stats for more than a dozen variants, including the Eyetouched template.
An eye-opening look at beholder cultists and their infiltration of humanoid civilizations, including everything you need to play a cultist or one of the beholders' corrupted eyekin servants.
A detailed guide to creating memorable beholder encounters, adventures, and long-term campaigns, covering tactical advice for combat, maps of common beholder lair designs, and new classes, feats, equipment, and magic items just for beholders.
New player options for fighting against beholders, including new classes, spells, and organizations.
And much more, all of it compatible with the 3.5 revision, with free bonus material available online.

 

[JoeGKushner]

I admit that I have certain weaknesses as a reader and a GM. When I see stuff about Beholders I instantly think about the damn fine campaign I ran back in 2nd edition using the full color Monstrous Arcana book that detailed out the Beholders and supported it with a trilogy of exciting adventures. How could this compare?

By making everything you know about beholders wrong, but not invalidated.

The book opens up with an illustration on the interior cover. Already a good sign of well utilized space. It's the Anatomy of the Beholder and it goes into some interesting notes like no organs and no throat or stomach as well as some variants based on Dominion. But what's this dominion you say?

Glad you asked. Back in the old Spelljammer Days when you couldn't swing a dead cat without hitting a Beholder Hive, these monsters waged war against one another based on physical appearance and were labeled as paranoid monsters who hated all life outside of their own. This book doesn't quite ignore that or even reference it, but it does give reasons why beholders fight one another and that's domains.

The domains are broken up into different concepts or ideas of how best to do things. We've got full details on nine domains: Consuming Eye, Enigma, Eternal Vigil, Final Forge, First Eye, Flesh Reborn, Poisoned Eye, Revelations, and the Watching Wheel. Each one has just about everything you need to get started. Want to know how they treat other domains or where they prefer to live or what they look like? What to know what changes in class skills or powers they get? How about common equipment, classes or even adventure ideas? The author's got you covered. The reason that people think that beholders all hate one another is that the different domains often battle one another due to differences in ideology, not racial hatred. It keeps the flavor while rewriting the background where no one can see it, perfect for those who think they know beholders.

Now that's cool enough for me right there, but there's a lot more. See that weird humanoid on the cover with the cloak and the eystalks coming out of the hood? That's probably an eyekin of some sort. Beholders aren't out to destroy the world but to conquer it through the use of cults and in some of those cults, they get members who have been around beholders too long or who have been exposed to what the beholders 'worship', the Void. This gives them different stats than their fellow human brothers and makes them a nice surprise to throw at the players.

Now we've got cultists and aberrations. Those are two of my weaknesses as a GM and a reader. It gets me thinking about the Mythos. But I mentioned the Void didn't I. You see the Void is basically a living plane and it's creation of the beholders, the reasoning, is something not fully known to the beholders but they feel that the Void's will is what they will so things are a little strange. I like the vagueness of it all as it reminds me a lot of the old Mythos creatures who really couldn't be pinned down to human reasoning or intelligence. One or the few things I'd think the book didn't hit enough on was the Void as it's own plane with it's own rules but hey, this isn't a book about the Void, it's about Beholders.

Now to further customize your monster, you've got some new character classes, a core class of the beholder cultists who gets eyes that have their own special powers, as well as the aberrant warrior, a being whose blood becomes like that of the eyekin and who gains tentacles which gain their own powers. Now we're talking about some nice elements of horror if properly sprung on an unsuspecting character. Those who don't want mortal servants but PrCs for their monsters have the Eye of the Void and the Juggernaut. The former gains more eyestalks as it gains levels and it's eye stalks gain strength in level and determining DC. The latter is a physical juggernaut whose brute power enables it to not only increase the range of it's rays but numerous bonus feats that augment it's physical aspects as well.

Now a lot of those bonus feats come straight from this book. We've got new feats that increase the beholders jaw damage as well as special feats for the eyekin that let them follow their master's more like Buoyant Blood where the eyekin gains a bonus to his jump check or gains the use of the feather fall spell. One of the things I thought most useful was the authors thinking about metamagic feats and the beholder. For each level needed to boost a spell, the DC to save against a beholder's ray attack is lowered but there is a limit to how low a beholder can take a ray. For example, if the level of effect is 3, the maximum modifier is -4. Good stuff overall and enhances core rules and other 3rd party feats without taking up a ton of space.

Just like players, beholders have their own items, both magical and mundane. This makes an encounter with a beholder so much more interesting than merely an unarmed and unprepared aberrant. Once again, the authors acknowledge that there are a lot of magic items already out there by indicating how beholders can use bracers, crowns, rings and other commonly found magic items, even as it introduces new types of armor and weapons, which can have their own enhancements. Nothing like facing a beholder with Juggernaut Plate of Fortification whose biting you with +2 Shocking Razorjaws that fit over it's regular teeth.

This is a lot of information to take in at one setting and could be problematic to use all at once, which is why the authors have included several encounters in the book, not only with beholders and eyekin, but with creatures who've suffered some taint that gives them a small glimmering of a beholder's shape and appearance through the eyetouched creature template.

Players may be weeping and gnashing their teeth, pondering how they can survive against these monsters. Chapter Nine may be a small chapter, but it has organizations that strive against beholders as well as two new PrCs that specialize in killing beholders, the Knight of Cleansing and the Tyrant Hunter. Those needing more reassurance that there is hope should look to the Purity clerical domain and the new spells found within it's ranks like Cleansing Burst, a spell that can kill weak aberrations while blinding or damaging more powerful ones.

It's a nice contrast to have this chapter here as earlier, the book provides the GM with ideas, tips, and tools on how to maximize the beholder's power including the note that hey, beholders are very powerful and a well played one with intelligence who maximizes it's flight and ranged ability can wipe out most parties and that sometimes they may have other motivations in fighting characters than merely killing them.

The book uses standard two column layout. Editing is good for the most part, conforming to 3.5 standards save for a regression to a feat like Ambidextiery that no longer exist. I'm afraid I don't have the devotion to check skill point totals, but I note that skills like survival so most of it looks 3.5 for game stats. Art is top notch, one of Goodman's best with fan favorite Andy Hopp contributing along with Scott Purdy, Brad McDevitt, Thomas Denmark and William McAusland.

There are a lot of other spots in the book I'm not getting to. For example, there are many new types of monsters to help guard the behodlers lairs, as well as a new template. There are details on beholder reproduction and lifestyle that help the GM decide where a beholder might be if an adventurer came calling to his home. There are campaign notes on how to use beholders in other genres that are simple but good starters. There are reasons why beholders need money and why they don't always kill those they battle with. There are variant rules for different eye effects on the beholders. It's a book I could put down and feel that it was very complete.

Is the book perfect? Some minor editing in the 3.5 rules would've been nice but I'd personally like to see more maps. The maps for the beholder lairs are nice but the dark background makes details difficult to see although general material is easy to read. I also don't think we need stats listed for every beholder dominion. A simple listing of the differences would've sufficed for most I think but it's a minor issue for me.

If you're into Beholders or are thinking of something new to make as the main antagonist for the party, from low level to high levels, then you need to pick up the Complete Guide to Beholders .

 

[John Cooper]

The Complete Guide to Beholders
By Keith Baker, Neal Gamache, and Matt Sprengeler
Goodman Games product number GMG 3004
128 pages, $22.00

I'm reading them out of order, but while The Complete Guide to Beholders was written after the release of 3.5 rules, it was still one of the earlier titles in the line. This one is the biggest "Complete Guide" I've seen, weighing in at a full 128 pages (much like the supersized books in the "Slayer's Guide" line by Mongoose, although those were only $19.95). It's a worthy entry in the series, and it's a good thing it was published when it was because it would no longer be possible to publish such a book today, what with beholders being removed from the SRD and all.

The cover is a full-color work by Michael Erickson, although the palette seems limited to blues, yellows, and oranges. It depicts a carving of a long-tongued beholder on the wall of some ruins, with a hooded, robed humanoid in the foreground. The humanoid is notable for the two lengthy eyestalks poking out from underneath the hood: obviously (after having read the book), this is a beholder cultist, whose "worship" of the beholders (and the Void from which they sprang) has bestowed these extra ocular appendages upon him. Of the three "Complete Guides" I own so far (the other two dealing with rakshasas and treants), this is my least favorite cover art, for several reasons. First, while I understand that the picture depicts a gloomy, hidden temple cloaked in shadows with just a single stream of light providing illumination - and thus the limited color palette is explained away - I still don't think it's such a great idea to limit the artwork in such a way, especially for the cover art which is intended to "grab" the viewer and get him to want to look inside the book. This artwork just isn't very "grabby." Also, I dislike the hooded cultist: not only are his robes the same color as the shadowy column on the left of the picture (making him blend into the background even while he's in the foreground), I really dislike his eyestalks. The eyestalks on the beholder carving on the wall behind the cultist are all drawn with the eyes looking straight on, and this isn't really a problem, because the beholder carving is very stylized. However, by having both of the cultists' eyestalks also looking straight at the viewer (with both of them even perfectly horizontal as far as the eyelid placement goes), it ends up making them look no more realistic than the stylized carving. I think this really detracts from the picture. On the plus side, I liked the folds and wrinkles in the cultist's cloak: they were nicely drawn and shaded, and those are often difficult to make look natural.

I was pleased to see the inside covers being put to good use this time. The front is an anatomical drawing (as is a "Slayer's Guide" standard; glad to see the trait carried over to the "Complete Guide" series as well), although it has its share of problems: "eyestalks" is misspelled ("eyestocks"), as is "Sphere" ("Shpere"); artist William McAusland might wish to add a dictionary to his list of "art supplies." The inside back cover is devoted to ads for other Goodman Games products, but I'm glad to see it put to such use. After all, why just leave it blank?

The artwork in the book's interior consists of 15 black-and-white illustrations by 5 different artists, plus 3 lair maps and two pieces of border art, one strip along the top of each page and another along the bottom. The artwork is rather hit and miss, and I was disappointed not to see an illustration of each of the new beholder variants in the back of the book (fortunately, some of the variants are shown on the bottom of the anatomical drawing on the inside front cover). On the other hand, several of the illustrations did not match the descriptions of the creatures, and for me this is an almost unpardonable sin: the beholder skirmisher on page 106 falls neatly between the descriptions of the greater beholder skirmisher on page 105 and the lesser beholder skirmisher on page 106, but it is actually neither creature. It can't be a greater beholder skirmisher, for these creatures have no mouths, and have eyes at the tips of four of their tentacles, and have more eyes scattered randomly around its body - which doesn't match the illustrated creature at all. Of course, it can't be a lesser beholder skirmisher, either, for while those creatures do have mouths, they don't have a central eye, and the creature illustrated does. Lesser beholder skirmishers also have eyes scattered throughout their bodies, and the creature depicted does not. I wonder just what monster this is, then? In any case, artist Thomas Denmark gets several points taken off for this particular illustration. All in all, I can't say I was overly impressed with the artwork in The Complete Guide to Beholders; even when the creatures are depicted correctly as described, many of them still manage to look pretty stupid, such as the "look how wide I can open my mouth" beholder on page 25, the "I have 15 different eyestalks, but they apparently can only look straight ahead at the viewer" Eye of the Void (a beholder prestige class) on page 39, or the "I'm a ketchup-eating cyborg!" cyber-beholder (demonstrating how beholders can be used as monsters in other genres) on page 56, complete with Humpty-Dumpty robot outfit and ten combat eyes dangling off the ends of springs. The maps were also somewhat disappointing, being white on dark gray and thus rather difficult to read.

The Complete Guide to Beholders is laid out as follows:

• Introduction: a brief description of how this book is laid out
• Beholder Physiology: Basic anatomy, movement, sight/sound/thought, the sovereign (standard beholder), subspecies, reproduction, eye rays and their uses, language, and the eyekin (humanoid slaves who start popping out eyes and eyestalks all over their bodies)
• The Secret Life of Beholders: The Dominions (beholder "races"), hierarchy, geopolitics, myths, rites and rituals, humanoid interactions, beholder cults, wars between Dominions, and conflicts with other species
• The Tyrants in Battle: Running sovereigns, general strategies, sovereign deadliness, eye rays in combat, antimagic cones, adventurer classes, beholder allies, and combat with multiple sovereigns
• Characters With Many Eyes: Beholder PCs, Eyekin PCs, beholder-related classes for humanoids (Beholder Cultists, Aberrant Warriors), beholder prestige classes (Eye of the Void, Juggernaut), 26 new feats, and metamagic feats with eye rays/eyebeams
• Beholder Equipment: 4 weapons, 6 types of armor, 4 special and superior items, and 13 beholder magic items
• The Beholder Campaign: Alternate settings, conversing with beholders, the nine Dominions, and 3 beholder encounters (adventure plot-lines)
• Beholder Architecture: Traps, lairs, outposts, eyeholds, citadels, urban beholder settlements, architecture and Dominions, and cultist temples
• Creature Statistics: Game stats for the modified "standard" beholder and 13 variants, plus the Eyetouched creature template and a chart of alternate eye rays
• Fighting the Tyrants: 3 organizations devoted to destroying beholders (or at least aberrations), 2 new classes (Knight of Cleansing, Tyrant Hunter), the Knowledge (aberrations) skill, and 9 new spells (plus the Purity domain)

Shall I cut to the chase this time? I give it a low "4 (Good)," even though I have some major reservations about the appropriateness of a lot of the background material. Still, despite my feelings on the subject, I have to admit that all of the material provided here fits together perfectly, meshing seamlessly into a unified whole. If you buy into the entering arguments provided in The Complete Guide to Beholders, then you honestly have everything here in this one book to run an entire campaign focused on fighting beholders of various flavors.

However, despite what a nice job the three authors did of meshing their material together (and I have to give them credit for writing with a "unified voice" as far as that goes - this certainly does not read like a book written by three different people), I did have a bit of trouble with some of the choices they made as far as beholder backgrounds. Perhaps part of my trouble here is that I really enjoyed the TSR product I, Tyrant from the final years of the AD&D 2nd Edition game, which I think really did an excellent job providing some background details on beholders and their kin. Here, however, the beholder background material is rewritten from scratch, ignoring what came before in previous editions and starting over with a clean slate. Okay, I can live with that approach (I suppose, begrudgingly), so long as you do something creative with the new background. Here's what we get: beholders are attached to "the Void" - an extradimensional sentient energy/being from beyond even the normal Outer Planes we're used to. This Void energy is what allows beholders to fly, and it also sustains them without food, water, and sleep. Yes, that's right, unlike I, Tyrant, which came up with logical, in-game reasons as to how beholders fly (their "skulls" are cartilaginous and filled with individual pockets of a lighter-than-air gas) and such, the authors of The Complete Guide to Beholders just wave it all away with the ever-irritating "it's magic." No, wait, not just any magic, it's a very special kind of magic called the Void that's different from other kinds of magic. I, Tyrant had anatomical diagrams showing a beholder's internal organs (and very creative diagrams they were, making everything seem feasible given the creature's unusual build); with this book, there's no need, because beholders don't have internal organs. Yep, that's right, beholders don't have lungs, they don't have a heart, they don't have reproductive organs - heck, they don't even have a brain! (Then how do they think? Or breathe? Well, they don't have to; you see, there's this very special kind of magic called the Void....)

Okay, I suppose I've made my irritation with this cop-out explanation evident enough, haven't I? Let's move on. The rest of this review is going to focus on what the authors have done with the beholder after you accept that beholders are tied into this Void energy that provides them with all of their magical abilities. And fortunately for this book, they do very well indeed.

Despite Void energy seeming to be a bit of a simplistic explanation, I must admit it does work well to explain some of the concepts that the authors come up with. In some ways, I'm reminded of "the Beyonder" from Marvel comic books some years back; the Beyonder was basically a sentient extradimensional plane where he was literally all that existed; the trouble started when a pinhole opened up between the Beyonder's dimension and that of the Marvel Universe, and this all-powerful entity came into the Marvel Universe without a true understanding about life and death, food, genders - or pretty much anything else, really. The Void reminds me more than a little of the Beyonder: it's a dimension of power but so different from normal reality that it has no clue as to what it is we're up to over here. Thus, it creates beholders to be its "eyes" into this weird little setup we've got going here on the Prime Material Plane. The Void infuses others with its energy, as well, which is why the eyekin (humanoid beholder slaves) and beholder cultists start sprouting eyes and eyestalks all over their bodies (ditto with the eyetouched, animals experimented on by a Dominion of beholders). Many of the feats are described as having come about by studying the ways of the Void.

The Void, being by definition "not like us" (existing in a completely different reality and all) also makes for a good explanation as to why beholders are often fighting amongst themselves. It turns out that there are different beholder Dominions, which are practically separate beholder races due not only to their physical appearances (one Dominion has beholders that are armor-plated like an insect, with multifaceted eyes; another has beholders covered in fur), but beliefs in what the Void wants them to do. All of the beholder Dominions might actually be correct, too - who's to say that the Void doesn't have different mind fragments, with each powering a separate Dominion? Also, despite trampling on the previously established beholder "facts" (from I, Tyrant and other works from previous editions of D&D/AD&D), this does at least show an attempt to mesh this "new material" in with the "old material" - while beholders in previous editions were described as extremely xenophobic, and who would war with other beholder "tribes" with differing physical appearances, it turns out this was actually wars between different beholder Dominions. Okay, I can actually buy that - nicely done. On the other hand, I think they went a little too far down the "let's come up with unique beholder physiologies" path; the Dominion of Flesh Reborn, which likes mucking about with the genetic makeup of local forest/jungle animals, is described as being covered in fur, with eyestalks looking like "small paws or arms." Um, no - that just sounds stupid. (I suppose there's a reason none of the artists chose to do up an illustration of one of these goofs.)

I pretty much liked most of the support material in The Complete Guide to Beholders, from the beholder prestige classes and new feats to the beholder-related classes (both those that "worship" beholders and the Void and those committed to their destruction). I even liked some of the material they came up with that directly contradicted things in I, Tyrant, like the fact that beholders have no ears (they used to have tympanic membranes in earlier editions) but can "see" sound waves. (Come to think of it, this was also a trait of the one-eyed fungal creatures from Piers Anthony's novels Ox, Orn, and Omnivore.) That's a pretty neat concept, and one that fits in nicely with the rest of the beholder's sight-based powers.

Perhaps it's because of this book's size, but The Complete Guide to Beholders has the worst proofreading/editing job of the three books in the series I've seen so far. Nothing too serious, but there were quite a few more errors than I'm used to seeing in a book by Goodman Games, who have overall impressed me with their strong work in these areas. I also noted a handful of instances of 3.0 terminology (the back cover specifies that "v3.5 revision" rules are used within), making me wonder if the book wasn't perhaps originally written using 3.0 rules and then "converted" before printing. Fortunately, the occasional reference to the Pick Pocket skill, the polymorph other spell, the "beast" creature type, or the term "demihumans" (which was out of date even with the 3.0 rules!) shouldn't have you scratching your head wondering how to convert them to 3.5.

There are, unfortunately, a few problems with some of the creature stats. For instance...

• p. 78: Ygurdi: Missing values for touch and flat-footed AC (should be 11 and 26, respectively), BAB (should be +8), Grapple (should be +12), Full Attack (should be +9 ranged touch (eye rays) and +2 melee (2d4, bite). Also, it only has 9 eye rays listed; it's missing charm person.
• p. 78, Chimera: Missing values for touch and flat-footed AC (should be 10 and 15, respectively), BAB (should be +9), Grapple (should be +17), Full Attack (should be +12 melee (2d6+4, dragon bite) and +12 melee (1d8+4, lion bite) and +12 melee (1d8+4, goat horn butt) and +10 melee (1d6+2, 2 claws)).
• p. 97, Flesh Reborn Sovereign: Bite attack should be at +3 melee, not +6 (+8 BAB, -5 for secondary attack, -1 size, +1 Weapon Focus (bite)).
• p. 98, Revelations Sovereign: This creature is given a bite attack, yet the description states it has no mouth! How, exactly, does it manage that?
• p. 101, Monitor: Grapple should be at -3, not -4 (+2 BAB, -4 size, -1 Str).
• p. 103, Lesser Beholder Overseer: With HD 8d8+16, average hit points should be 52, not 50.
• p. 108, Incubator: Advancement listed as "31-45 HD (Gargantuan), 45-70 HD (Colossal)" - that should be "46-70 HD," as a 45-HD Incubator would fall under the Gargantuan size category as previously listed.
• p. 109, Laborer: Eyerays should attack at +6 ranged touch, not +8 (+9 BAB, -2 size, -1 Dex); I think the authors forgot that the creature's Focused Eye (telekinesis) feat adds a +2 to the save DC, not the attack. Incidentally, that save DC should be 18, not 17.

Other problems: if a beholder can take one level of the Eye of the Void prestige class for every 3 levels it has, then a beholder with 12 levels could take 4 levels, not 3 as stated on page 38. And since the "standard" beholder (called a "sovereign" in this book) has gained a swim speed, immunities to inhaled poisons, sleep effects, drowning, starvation, airborne diseases, and dehydration as a result of its link to the Void, shouldn't its Challenge Rating be raised at least to 14?

Overall, The Complete Guide to Beholders is my least favorite of the three I've seen so far. I put it on the edge of a "high 3/low 4" and while my personal opinion (as far as use for my own campaign) puts it into the "3 (Average)" range (I really dislike the "Void as an all-purpose excuse for everything" explanation), anyone willing to overlook that is going to get a nicely-meshed, interlocking set of beholder lore that will give them fodder for all types of adventures. I feel that puts it above a mere "Average" rating and over into "Good." (But I must admit to liking I, Tyrant much better.)