Best Mon

Thoughts on Beholders?

Scientifically proven to die in Dead magic zones in Neverwinter Nights 1, and is the only major Aberration species reliant on such a force to survive.

Aboleths don't even fucking use the weave, they're a servitor race from fucking Ry'leh

Beholder mages though? Jesus fuck, forces of pure rape thank fuck they're few and inbetween because of the antimagic eye issue.

Not all bad.

They are possibly one of the hardest bosses in Dragons Crown. Gives me nightmares till today.

I personally dislike the "Created from their own nightmares" thing that 5e did, but I started with 3e, so that's most likely a not inconsiderable factor.

Pretending Mimics aren't the best monster.
They are a trap and a monster rolled up into one. Throw one of them at your party and make them doubt every chest you through at them in the future.

If ANY Beholder Mages even exist there's no way they don't run the fucking world.

Using only chest mimics is a waster tho.
Wall, floor and ceiling mimics. Door mimics.
Teasure (coins, jewels, etc) mimics.
They all have place on my table.

Beholders and aboleths are two of my favourite d&d monsters. When played smartly they are hilariously overpowered for their CR. Dragons too

Aren't Beholders canonically insane though? I believe they have two minds, both of which suffer from extreme paranoia and arrogancy, and can turn against each other at a moment's notice.

>tfw the party falls for a leap of faith scene at a dead end in a dungeon where the opening on the other side is just a mimic

Not nearly as good as illithids or mimics.

>When the party starts searching for secret passages behind the bookcases but one of them is actually a mimic

One of the bookcases is a mimic, or one of the passages? or one of the party?

Bookcase.
Having the party split ways and a mimic/doppleganger take the place of one character is something I would like to do, but I'm not sure how to surprise my players out of character with it, so I never did.

One is the rational mind and the other is the instinctive mind
It's basically a more extreme version of the human conscious vs unconscious
The unconscious is full of insecurities and the like and the rational mind filters out which are relevant to a given situation. But the repressed insecurities fester and the two minds are constantly at war

Fuck off Dark Souls scum. This isn't /v/, stop shitting up our board

Find one player that's especially good at separating in character from out of character and have him play the mimic that replaced him. Would still take a lot of setup.

These things always creeped me out

>read this
>suddenly years of dormant Book of Abberations knowledge hums online

There is an ideal beholder shape and they each consider themselves it, so seeing any beholder with an eye stalk at a slightly different angle or having rubbery skin rather than chitonous plates must be dealt with.

Typically two beholders will endeavor to keep each other in their cone of anti magic gaze. Then their smaller laser eye stalk sets to task severing stalactites onto their rival.

Mind flayers are by far the coolest aberrations. I can almost feel pity for them because they're only capable of the negative spectrum of emotions and they're being cucked by the elder brains.

They're genius. When you read Lords of Madness or anything else that expounds on their physiology, you realize that they're a symbolic and hyperbolic representation of everything that is wrong with subjective perception and especially the human psyche.

I like spectators on an emotional level, though. They're basically beholderkin who have reconciled the differences between their rational and irrational minds, so they can behave somewhat sanely, so instead of inflicting their weird madness on people and things they seek to learn more from everything they see.

That sounds like every internet argument that has ever happened

Eye Tyrant minidump

Don't forget the odd one out when it comes to beholderkin
Control freaks can't even move more than 10ft per round

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Alt designs

>when freaks of nature go wrong

You mean when they go terribly, terribly right because they can exert control over other beholders that rivals that of hive mothers

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My group just "fought" a low-level beholder.

By "fought," I mean "engaged in light conversation, discovered it was an extremely long-lived summon, destroyed the undead remnant of the mage that summoned it, and convinced it that its mission was complete and it could cease to exist, so it did." Our eldritch knight of all people literally talked a spectator out of existing.

L I T E R A L L Y baldur's gate

*shrug* It's a published adventure, so idunno.

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Ugh, why does it have a butthole?

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for pooping

This one's pretty far from baseline but I like it.

>It's a published adventure
Which one is that?

No, it's true. Baldur's gate followed a lot of creature/species-specific stereotypes and did little else.

I shouldn't have been so critical. Your DM played spectators out in a way that is true to their nature.

and the classic

Beholders are pretty great.

In my headcanon - cannot remember how well the reflects what's what in pub'lished sources - "aberration" is really a WTF Misc category rather than a branch of related monsters, laregly because Beholders seem genuinely fucking weird to me rather than being HPL imports into D&D.

I would text my DM, but he's asleep.

Eberron, rural Breland, hired by a dwarf named Gundren Rockseeker to clear out a mine and find his missing brothers. That's probably enough to google it, but I haven't tried because I value spoilers.

I remember reading somewhere about this awesome idea of treating Mimics as the larval forms of Dopplegangers.

Gundren Rockseeker the dwarf is from the very popular adventure Lost mines of Phandelver which is typically set in the area of Neverwinter in the Forgotten Realms setting.