Beholders are some of the most infamous of D&D's aberrations, floating masses of eyes wielding dangerous magic. Even two "standard" beholders can look very different, while some of their related creatures are even more bizarre.

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General Tropes

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Beholderkin are strange creatures that live in caverns deep beneath the earth. They're a wide family with many branches, but almost all beholderkin are floating, orb-like creatures with a single central eye, an additional set of eyestalks capable of projecting magical beams, and a very alien, hostile and often insane outlook on life.

Anti-Magic: The central eye of most beholders projects an anti-magic cone that shuts down magic. Unfortunately, this cone also affects their own eye beams.
Blue-and-Orange Morality: Beholder morality is very, very weird. For one thing, they're so self-centered that they actually hate other beholders (for being deviants from true beholderdom) more than they hate other races, and their extraordinary paranoia means they hate other races quite a lot.
Extra Turn: Generally capable of firing beams from multiple eyestalks per round, though with limits on how many they can aim in the same direction.
Eye Beams: One of their signature powers is their ability to fire rays from their stalk eyes, which can simulate the effect of a number of powerful spells.
Flying Face: Beholders resemble floating heads with a single eye and fang-lined maws, and "hair" made out of eyestalks. There is considerable speculation in-universe as to how they make this body shape work, and they have some interesting organ placement to compensate — their stomachs are in their lower jaws, for instance.
Oculothorax: Beholders have a spheroid body with a great bulging eye sitting above a wide, toothy maw. They are the Trope Codifier for these monsters in fantasy games.
Theme Naming: Most type of beholderkin are named after a synonym for "beholder" (gazer, spectator, examiner, watcher, observer, etcetera).
Throw It In!: Their background as hating other beholders for looking different from themselves was inspired by their inconsistent features in artwork at the time.

True Beholders

Beholder

''Every beholder thinks it is the epitome of beholderkind, and the only thing it fears is that it might be wrong." —Valkara Ironfell, dwarf sage

Classification: Aberration (3.5E, 5E), Aberrant Magical Beast (4E)
Challenge Rating: 13 (3E), 19 (4E), 13 (5E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil, Evil (4E)

Beholders, sometimes referred to as eye tyrants, are bizarre creatures that live deep underground. They resemble fleshy orbs dominated by a single huge eye above a fang-filled mouth, topped by a cluster of smaller eyestalks, but exhibit extreme mutability within this template in terms of flesh color, skin and eyestalk texture, or the size of their body parts.

Immensely egotistical, beholders believe themselves to be the pinnacle of living things, and each and every beholder views itself as the apex of beholderkind. When two beholders meet each other, they will scrutinize each other for the smallest flaws and deviations from the ideal beholder form (that is, from their own personal form). Upon inevitably finding some minute difference, they will then attempt to kill each other for being repulsive abominations.

Absolute Xenophobe: Beholders believe in nothing so pedestrian as racial supremacy, but on an individual basis consider themselves to be the most spectacular thing that ever has or ever will exist and absolutely despise anything and everything else, including other beholders. The reason they haven't overrun the universe, given that they reproduce by dreaming? It's because their first instinct is to kill eachother out of hand.
Appearance Is in the Eye of the Beholder: The beholders' creator deity is the Great Mother, who they venerate so much that each chooses to remember being personally birthed by her, regardless of the actual circumstances of their creation. Sometimes her avatar appears to a crowd of beholders, which would seem to settle the question of which is the true ideal beholder form... except for the fact that any beholder who looks upon the Great Mother only sees their own features, scaled up. In other words, beauty lies in the eye of the beholder.
Battle Trophy: Beholders enjoy taking trophies from slain foes, and their lairs are decorated with the petrified remnants of defeated adventures, pieces of other beholders, and magical items taken from powerful foes.
Berserk Button: The one time when adventurers might be happy to encounter a beholder is if they're already fighting another one and it looks in any way different from the new arrival, as both beholders will then try to bite each other to death for being "imperfect".
Bizarre Alien Biology: Beyond being a floating head studded with eyestalks, beholders have incredibly-developed eyes with with three retinas and up to a dozen lenses within them, each capable of rotating and moving independently, giving them exceptional vision and allowing them to precisely aim their eye-rays, as well as "evocularies" that transmit magical energy. The rest of their internal anatomy is "a tangled, brightly colored, often inscrutable mess of tubes, sacs, coils and 'things' that have little or no analogy to those found in a human." These organs are also responsible for a beholder's ability to float (despite lacking any form of buoyant gas), and will actually hang in the air like grisly balloons for up to 12 hours after being removed from a beholder corpse.
Bizarre Alien Psychology: Beholders have two minds, an intuitive, emotional one and a coldly logical one. They process their data through the emotional part before transferring it to the logical part, which in most cases means protecting it from anything that might damage it, such as memories of past failures. "In the gulf that exists between a beholder's two minds lurk its paranoia and xenophobia." This renders most beholders insane by other races' standards, but some beholders' twin minds are able to work together without blocking or suppressing knowledge, which lets them interact with other beings in a less destructive manner, though such beholders "remain just as capable of cruelty and sadism as the more common variety."
Bizarre Alien Reproduction: Beholders, depending on edition, are either asexual or hermaphroditic, but in either case reproduction ends with the beholder puking up its uterus so that its offspring can then eat their way free. Once it recovers, it tends to kill and/or eat the ones it thinks look the least like itself. More recently they've been re-skinned as literal nightmares made manifest, and reproduce both their own kind and various beholderkin by involuntarily dreaming them into existence.
Bizarre Alien Senses: Beholders use their tongues as one of their primary manipulators, so they have next to no tastebuds. A beholder considers two factors when they eat: the food's texture, and its appearance (since their eyestalks mean they can watch themselves in the process of eating). One 3.5 plot hook involves a beholder who throws its prisoners into a pit of fungus before devouring them, as it's developed a "taste" for creatures covered in fungal spores.
Combat Breakdown: Beholders are fearsome enemies thanks to their multitude of eye-rays, but when two beholders fight one another, their mutual use of their anti-magic central eyes means that the aberrations must resort to crashing against and biting each other to deal damage.
Conspiracy Theorist: Beholders are extremely paranoid creatures, believing that they are the targets of multiple conspiracies motivated by jealousy over how incredible they are. Perhaps inevitably, their possession of two minds means that each mind doesn't trust the other.
Disintegrator Ray: One of the eye beams they can project functions as the spell disintegrate, which they like to use against any foe that seems like a real threat. Sages have wondered why, if beholders can use such devastating magic at will, they haven't destroyed the world one 10-foot cube at a time, leading a half-elf scholar named Odiit Tenrest to suggest that beholders need non-beholders around to have something to feel superior to.
Genetic Memory: Young beholders are born with such, so that they can speak the beholder language within minutes of emerging from the womb, and they soon display "powerful xenophobic and intolerant tendencies. For these reasons, it is difficult for a beholder to become anything but evil."
Handy Mouth: Beholders obviously cannot wield conventional weapons, but those who develop a taste for close combat have come up with "mouthpicks," weapon variants enchanted to mold to a creature's mouth, allowing the weapon to be wielded in lieu of a natural bite attack.
Magic Eater: Lords of Madness describes beholders as a downplayed example of this trope. Each beholder has specialized "evocularies" in its central eye connected to "dweomerlobes" in its brain, which power its eye-stalks' spell-like abilities by absorbing magic by viewing it through its main eye (the same one that can generate a cone of Anti-Magic). The actual magic drained from looking at something like a scroll or wand is minuscule, and it would take extended viewing to drain the item to uselessness, but beholders get more benefit from examining new and different magic items.
Mundane Utility: Beholders often use their disintegrator eye beam to excavate their lairs.
No True Scotsman: Every beholder judges its fellows by their own solipsistic conceit of themselves as the gold standard of the species, made in the image of the Great Mother; if the other doesn't measure up to that impossible standard, they aren't a beholder, and everything that isn't a beholder deserves to die. Since no two of them are entirely alike, near-identical beholders will spend a long time sizing each other up before deciding on a tiny "irregularity" as a pretext to fight, or just imagining one.
Reality Warper: A beholder's dreams can distort reality in 5th edition. If it dreams of another beholder, or of seeing its reflection, it will wake up to find that its dream has brought one or more new beholders into existence. If it dreams of ways to live on after death, it will wake up as an undead death tyrant.
Sanity Has Advantages: Beholders are incredibly destructive and would be a terrifying threat to the world if they weren't so batshit crazy. They can disintegrate matter at will, control minds, kill with a glance and nullify any magic, but they're also all individually convinced that they and they alone are created in the true image of their goddess, and any beholders that look slightly different must be destroyed, even their own offspring. They can't even come together to form a coherent society because they all hate each other so much. Rare "sane beholders" do exist who have managed to become small-scale Evil Overlords, but they often rely on go-betweens and magical disguises out of fear of being discovered by their kin.
Self-Harm–Induced Superpower: Beholders are already potent arcanists thanks to their eye-rays, but if one wants to learn new magic, they have to do something about their central anti-magic eye. Thus, beholder magi must put out their central eye at the start of their arcane study, but gain the ability to convert their existing eyestalks into "spellstalks" that cast additional magic.
Supernatural Fear Inducer: One of the eyebeams they can project causes its target to become frightened. They use this ray to disorient their opponents during combat, and as a form of psychological torture out of combat.
Taken for Granite: One of the eye beams they can project functions as the spell flesh to stone. Beholders tend to favor this one when fighting spellcasters, although they also use it on creatures that they find interesting in order to use them as decorations.
Truly Single Parent: Beholders reproduce without any need for mating. Instead, after reaching adulthood, the womb located beneath every beholder's tongue will spontaneously generate a litter of offspring. In 5th Edition, beholders instead reproduce by dreaming each other into existence, a process that, once again, involves a single "parent" individual.
Tulpa: In 5th Edition, when beholders dream obsessively about a specific subject, their dreams can manifest as the beholderkin, beholder-like entities with bodies and abilities shaped by the traits of the dreams that gave them birth.

Death Tyrant

Origin: Spelljammer
Classification: Undead (3E, 5E)
Challenge Rating: 13 (3E), 14 (5E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

Undead beholders that sometimes arise as a result of an obsessive desire to endure beyond death.

Animate Dead: Any humanoid that dies while a death tyrant is looking at it with its central eye becomes a zombie under the death tyrant's command. There’s no limit to the number of zombies a death tyrant can command this way, so it can easily create a small army of the dead from its victims.
Anti-Regeneration: Instead of the anti-magic cone of a regular beholder's gaze, the death tyrant's central eye prevents healing both magic and non-magical for anything in its line of sight.
Glowing Eyelights of Undeath: The death tyrant's 5E artwork shows it with a glowing red light in the center of its main eye socket and ten smaller dots floating around its head, marking where its smaller eyestalks would have been in life.
Non-Human Undead: On rare occasions, a beholder's sleeping mind drifts to places beyond its normal madness, imagining a reality in which it exists beyond death. When such dreams take hold, a beholder can transform into an undead death tyrant.
Retcon: In older material, death tyrants are more zombie-like than skeletal, and are usually created by powerful human spellcasters from dying beholders.

Elder Orb

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 17 and up (3E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

Most beholders rarely live past 120 years, but perhaps one in a hundred is inexplicably able to live for centuries, growing larger and more powerful.

The Ageless: Elder orbs are immortal unless slain, and unlike lesser beholders, never become senile or lose their eyestalk powers. The elder orbs attribute this longevity to embodying "the primal purity of the Great Mother."
Evilutionary Biologist: In 2nd Edition, which casts beholders as hermaphrodites, elder orbs arrange meetings with lesser beholders in an effort to breed a superior, more magical breed of beholder that is loyal to their elder orb progenitor. Their mate and any failures among the offspring are converted into death tyrants, and so far, the elder orbs haven't been able to breed more obedient beholders.
King Mook: They're bigger and more powerful beholders, and can become leaders of their lesser kin. 2nd Edition describes them as "the wise councilors, decision-makers, and leaders of various beholder factions" across Wildspace.
Necromancer: 2nd Edition states that elder orbs can both create and command death tyrants, which they use as meatshields (boneshields) in combat.
Sanity Has Advantages: They're more level-headed, tolerant and farsighted than other beholders, and for example view adventurers as potential assets to be utilized rather than immediate threats to be attacked.
Stronger with Age: Once they reach "venerable" age, elder orbs stop taking physical ability score penalties, but keep gaining bonuses to their mental ability scores, and develop additional magical abilities (in 3E terms, they start gaining levels of sorcerer). They also slowly continue growing, so that the oldest elder orbs are Huge creatures.

Hive Mother

Origin: Spelljammer
Classification: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 16 (3.5E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

Even rarer than elder orbs, these beholders are capable of magically controlling other beholderkin, allowing them to form beholder cities.

Keystone Army: A hive mother's telepathic control is usually the only thing keeping the other beholders' hatred for each other under control. If she's killed her minions will instantly turn on each other or disperse.
Large and in Charge: They're certifiably Huge, a size category larger than lesser beholders.
Mind Control: Hive mothers can exert complete control over beholders and beholderkin, and can additionally cast charm monster and charm person from their smaller eyes to attempt to control other beings.
Monster Lord: Hive mothers can telepathically control beholders and beholder-kin, and use this ability to set themselves up as the rulers of "hives" of magically dominated eye tyrants, often supported by overseers who serve as a sort of city council. They consider themselves to be the chosen of the Great Mother, on a mission to unify beholderkind... which means that beholder cities ruled by rival hive mothers are their greatest foes, representing "all that is tainted and wrong about the beholder race."

Beholderkin

Beholderkin are a broad grouping of creatures related and physically similar to, but distinct from, true beholders. Almost all are as evil and cruel as beholders are, although they do not share their intense xenophobia. Beholders consider beholderkin to be abominations — although, of course, beholders also consider each other to be abominations.

Death Kiss

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Aberration (3E, 5E)
Challenge Rating: 11 (3.5E), 10 (5E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Death kisses, also called bleeders or eyes of terror, are beholderkin whose long stalks end in blood-draining mouths. In 5th Edition, death kisses arise when a beholder dreams of blood.

Art Evolution: Their 3E appearance has thick tentacles which make them appear somewhat like an octopus, while 5E reduces them to thin strands emerging from a more obviously spherical central body.
Body to Jewel: Death kisses have a nerve node within their bodies that hardens into a red gem when the creature dies. These jewels are called bloodeyes, and are prized for their soft glow that intensifies with the wearer's emotions.
Combat Tentacles: A death kiss' tentacles are its primary weapons, and can deal damage both through their barded tips and by sucking blood.
Shock and Awe: While they cannot actively control it, death kisses are surrounded by an electric aura that can harm those who tangle with them in melee.
Taking You with Me: When a death kiss dies, it internal electrical charges shoot out of its corpse in a last area attack.
Too Many Mouths: A death kiss has ten long tentacles, each ending in a mouth full of teeth.

Director

Origin: Spelljammer
Classification: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 8 (3E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

Tentacled beholderkin that act as cavalry units for beholder cities.

Deflector Shields: Their central eye projects an invisible force field that improves the Armor Class and Reflex saves of both the director and its mount.
Horse of a Different Color: These beholderkin are often found riding various giant vermin, using their tentacles to grasp their steeds just behind their head while the director fires off burning rays or force missiles with their eyestalks. They've even developed specialized mounts such as "crawlers," spider-centipedes with a paralyzing venom.
Puppeteer Parasite: A director can dominate any vermin they grasp with their tentacles, an effect that lasts as long as the two are in physical contact. As a side benefit, when bonded this way both the director and its mount take half damage from attacks.

Examiner

Alignment: Lawful Neutral

Four-foot-wide spherical creatures with four eyestalks and four multi-jointed limbs, who serve more powerful beholderkin as clerks, scholars and magical artisans.

Healing Factor: They constantly regenerate 1 hit point per round.
Item Caddy: In a rarity for beholderkin, examiners have limbs capable of picking up and manipulating objects. This lets them utilize magic items just as easily as humans, and since they can fly, examiners can use all four limbs to wield magic items at the same time.
Lamprey Mouth: They have a small one on their ventral surface.
Non-Action Guy: Compared to other beholderkin, examiners aren't much for combat, and their eye-rays fire utility spells like enlarge/reduce, identify or legend lore, a variant of stone shape that works on all inorganic matter, and spell reflection. But their ability to utilize magic items, or even artifacts, makes them potentially among the most dangerous of beholderkind.
Servant Race: They're natural lackeys for overseers, true beholders and hive queens.

Eye Monger

Origin: Spelljammer
Classification: Aberration (5E)
Challenge Rating: 10 (5E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

Also known as "astereaters," these beholderkin hide in asteroid fields, disguising themselves as space rocks until prey draws close.

Fantastic Racism: All true beholders hate beholderkin, but astereaters are particularly despised as "vile errors of creation" owing to their stupidity and lack of magical ability.
Swallowed Whole: They can swallow Medium-sized or smaller creatures they bite, and in 5th Edition, a swallowed victim is also subject to an Anti-Magic effect.
That's No Moon: With their eye and mouth shut, an eye monger can easily be mistaken for an ordinary asteroid.

Eye of the Deep

Classification: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 8 (3.5E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

Aquatic beholders with two eyestalks and a pair of crablike claws.

Aquatic Mook: They're a fairly straightforward variant of beholder that you find underwater.
Blinded by the Light: An eye of the deep's central eye can emit flashes of intense light that can blind and stun victims.
Luring in Prey: They hunt by attracting victims with a persistent image illusion of something like shipwreck survivors, small islands, or comely mermaids.
Power Pincers: Their clawed hands can grapple and constrict opponents.

Gauth

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Aberration (3.5E, 5E), Aberrant Magical Beast (4E)
Challenge Rating: 6 (3E, 5E), 5 (4E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil (2E), Lawful Evil (3E, 5E), Evil (4E)

Lesser beholders with four tentacles growing from their bottom and a ring of smaller eyes surrounding their central one. Gauths originate from an unknown plane, and are occasionally called into the material plane by failed attempts to summon spectators.

An Ice Person: They can cast cone of cold through one of their eyestalks.
Art Evolution: Their 2nd Edition art shows them with a downward-pointing circular mouth on the lower section of their bodies and with a set of tough ridges separating the eyelets around their central eye, but modern artwork shows them with a regular, forward-facing set of jaws and omits the ridges.
Magic Eater: Gauth feed on the magic of enchanted objects. One of their eye beams allows them to do this in combat, draining one charge at a time from magical items or, for permanently enchanted ones, rendering them useless for a round. They can also swallow magical items, where items with charges lose one per round and permanently magical ones are drained over a day; the items are spat back out once the gauth has sucked them dry. They cannot, however, drain magic or spells from living creatures. They can live fine on meat, but prefer to eat magic.
Shock and Awe: They can cast lightning bolt through one of their eyestalks.

Gazer

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 1/2 (3.5-5E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Also known as "eyeballs," these tiny beholderkin are no smarter than animals, and sometimes taken as familiars.

Familiar: Gazers can be taken as familiars by evil spellcasters, usually true beholders or humanoid wizards associated with aberrations in some way.
An Ice Person: Gazers can cast ray of frost through one of their eyestalks, which serves as their main weapon when hunting or fighting.
Meta Power: In 3E, where a spellcaster can transfer a touch-range spell to their familiar to have them attack with it, an eyeball familiar has the special ability to deliver these spells from a distance by firing them as Eye Beams.
Mini Mook: They're essentially tinier, weaker beholders about eight inches across.

Gouger

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 11 (3.5E)
Alignment: Neutral Evil

Spear-tongued monsters bred to hunt other beholders.

Bioweapon Beast: In their home setting, gougers were created by the phaerimm as anti-beholder weapons, though they haven't kept close control over the creatures, leading gougers to spread throughout the Underdark.
Eye Scream: When fighting other beholderkin, gougers specialize in using their tongues to sever eyestalks and gouge out the central eyes.
Food Chain of Evil: As their entry explains, "The gouger was bred to stalk and kill normal beholders. What can kill a beholder can destroy a party of adventurers."
Multipurpose Tongue: A gouger's tongue is fifteen feet long, very strong and very sharp, and serves as its primary weapon in combat.

Lensman

Alignment: Neutral Evil

Human-sized beholderkin with starfish-shaped bodies, which walk upright and can wield weapons.

Combat Tentacles: Four of their limbs three-fingered, two-clawed hands, which can serve as arms and legs, leaving the fifth tentacle free to whip foes in combat.
Exposed Extraterrestrials: Averted; lensmen are the only beholderkin to wear some sort of clothing, webbing for their tools and weapons.
Eye Beams: Their eye can fire a single spell, either emotion, heal, dispel magic, tongues, phantasmal force or protections.
Servant Race: Lensmen are "semi-mindless drones that don't question their lot in life."

Observer

Origin: Planescape
Alignment: Lawful Neutral

Chitinous, multi-mouthed beholderkin who live in Lawful-leaning Outer Planes like Acheron, Mechanus and parts of the Outlands, establishing domains to dominate.

Chest Burster: One rumor is that observers reproduce by implanting one of their slaves with a parasitic egg, until their offspring eats its way out of its host.
Knowledge Broker: Observers hoard both wealth and knowledge, and anyone able to meet their prices can find them valuable sources of information.
Mind Control: They can use domination as a magic or psionic power, allowing observers to enslave any living creature in their territory and sculpt their servants' minds to fit the observers' "strange, alien set of values and ideals." This means each has a small army of mind-wiped minions to defend their territory.
Mind over Matter: Their three main eyes fire rays of telekinetic force they can use to move things around, block incoming missiles, or strike telekinetic blows.
Psychic Powers: In addition to their spell-like abilities, observers have an array of telepathic and psychokinetic powers like telekinesis, domination and mind bar they use when magic fails or a subtle approach is needed.
Token Heroic Orc: They're more Lawful Neutral than Evil, prefer to use negotiation and manipulation before resorting to violence, "and are often content to leave well enough alone," especially when traveling the planes... though in their home domains, all this goes out the window, and they'll ruthlessly attack any perceived threats. They're also less xenophobic than other beholders, and mostly ignore other observers and their domains, unless they start competing for the same territory and resources.
Too Many Mouths: Observers have three mouths (on retractable and extendable stalks) spaced around their body, each accompanied by a large eye.
True Sight: An observer's main eyes have a true seeing effect, foiling illusions and invisibility.

Orbus

Origin: Spelljammer
Alignment: Unaligned

Stunted or immature forms of beholders, only found upon their tyrant ships in Wildspace.

Non-Action Guy: They're this compared to other beholders; orbi have no offensive magic or physical attacks whatsoever, only the anti-magic ray of their central eye.
Organic Technology: They're essentially living spelljammer helms, somehow converting the magical energy of other beholders into propulsion. In fact, orbi have an Intelligence score of 0.

Overseer

Origin: Spelljammer
Classification: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 15 (3E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

Appearing like rubbery, fleshy trees, these beholderkin often serve as lieutenants to hive mothers in beholder cities.

Combat Tentacles: They can make eight tentacle attacks in melee, which can also grab and constrict foes.
Mind Control: Overseers can use dominate person with an eye ray, as well as a variant of dominate monster that affects beholders and beholderkin, with the exception of other overseers and hive mothers.
Living Mood Ring: The thick, wiry fungus that covers an overseer not only provides bonuses to their Armor Class, it changes color in reaction to the creature's emotions.
Manipulative Bastard: In the rare event an overseer isn't keeping order in a beholder city, it seeks out another community it can infiltrate and dominate from behind the scenes, amassing a number of minions to tend to its real (or imagined) needs.
Mighty Glacier: Overseers can't fly and can only move one square per round, but they have a very high Armor Class, and are nearly as effective with their physical attacks as they are while using eye rays such as chain lightning or polar ray.

Spectator

Origin: Forgotten Realms
Classification: Aberration (3E, 5E)
Challenge Rating: 4 (3E), 3 (5E)
Alignment: Lawful Neutral

Spectators are unusually non-hostile beholders from the Outer Planes, which can be summoned to stand watch over valuable items.

Attack Reflector: As long as their central eye is intact, spectators can reflect one ranged spell per round back at its caster.
Telepathy: Spectators are naturally telepathic, and use this as their primary means of communication.
Token Heroic Orc: On a species-wide scale, spectators are this to the rest of beholderkin. They're no saints, but they're fairly even-tempered, aren't terribly interested in fighting other beings if not given a reason to, are usually quite willing to carry on a civil conversation, and can even form friendships with each other or with other beings — traits no other beholderkin displays.

Watcher

Alignment: True Neutral

Semi-intelligent, eye-studded, six-foot-wide spherical creatures that serve as information-gatherers.

Combat Tentacles: Their only attack is to lash with their ventral tentacle, which deals more damage than a greatsword.
Extra Eyes: They have three large eyes spaced equidistantly around their circumference (which can use true seeing and ESP, advanced illusion and demi-shadow magic, and telekinesis and teleport, respectively), capped by a bug-like compound eye (which can cast message, tongues and suggestion), as well as a ring of six eyespots that have no magical powers.
Shock Stick: In addition to physical damage, a watcher's tail inflicts an electrical shock that can instantly knock out victims who fail a saving throw.

Related Creatures

Eyedrake

Classification: Aberration
Challenge Rating: 8 (5E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

When a beholder grows obsessed with a draconic rival, its fevered dreams can manifest as an eyedrake, a beholder-like creature with draconic features.

Breath Weapon: The eyedrake's mouth emits a breath-like wave of antimagic energy.
Dragon Hoard: If left to its own devices, an eyedrake exhibits a dragon's stereotypical behaviour to gather and jealously protect its hoard.
Eyes Do Not Belong There: An eyedrake's wings are made of eyestalks, and its mouth is perpetually open, showing a large central eye.

Gas Spore

Classification: Plant (3E, 5E), Fey Beast (4E)
Challenge Rating: 3 (3E), 4 (4E), 1/2 (5E)
Alignment: Unaligned

Gas spores aren't true beholderkin, but instead a kind of fungus that strongly resembles beholders and is often used by the aberrations as a living trap for would-be beholder slayers.

Festering Fungus: Gas spores reproduce by spreading clouds of aggressively parasitic spores, which infest living being, rapidly turn them into piles of mush, and grow a new clutch of gas spores from their remains.
Living Gasbag: Unlike beholders, who float supernaturally, gas spores float through sacs filled with buoyant gas.
Mimic Species: Gas spores greatly resemble much more dangerous beholders. They are almost completely harmless if left alone, but their mimicry goads beholder-slayers into attacking them and releasing their clouds of toxic spores.
Multiple-Choice Past: Nobody truly knows where they came from, though since they resemble Beholders to a startling degree, the prevailing theory is that they came from parasitic fungi that fed on the corpses of Beholders and were changed by the latent magic of the aberrations. However, other theories posit that they were created on purpose by beholder mages, illithids or even myconids.
One-Hit-Point Wonder: According to the 5E Monster Manual, the average Gas Spore only has a single hit point.^note 1d10 - 4 hit points.
Taking You with Me: When slain, a gas spore explodes in a cloud of deadly parasitic spores.

Gibbering Orb

Challenge Rating: 27 (3E and 4E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil (3E), Unaligned (4E)

An incredibly powerful Hybrid Monster combining traits of beholderkin and gibbering mouthers, and suggested to be a common ancestor of both. See Dungeons And Dragons Creatures G.

Gorbel

Alignment: Unaligned

Three-foot-wide spherical animals that are either a distant relative of true beholders or the product of a mage's experiments.

Armed Legs: They attack by quickly drifting into a target and latching on with their clawed feet, and once attached a gorbel will keep dealing clawing damage each round until either it or its target are dead. On the upside, they're quite easy to hit once they've attached to a foe.
Attack! Attack! Attack!: These unintelligent creatures attack and try to eat anything that moves, which can include trees swaying in the breeze.
Constantly Curious: They tend to investigate anything out of the ordinary in their territory (such as an adventuring party's camp), frantically mewing like a kitten if they find something that catches their interest... which they then try to attack and eat.
Defeat Equals Explosion: Their rubbery hides are immune to blunt weapons, but any hit with a piercing or slashing weapon, or any sort of magical damage, will make a gorbel explode for minor damage in a 5-foot radius. Since gorbels aren't immune to each others' blast damage, this means that one well-placed attack can trigger a chain reaction that wipes out an entire gorbel herd at once.
Living Gasbag: Zig-zagged; gorbels' rubbery red bodies are filled with a pyrophoric gas, and they're much faster drifting through the air than plodding on the ground, but sages believe their actual method of propulsion is magic similar to a levitation spell.
Organ Drops: Their six eyes, while incapable of producing magic rays like true beholders, can be harvested as components for wizard eye spells or similar magic. Similarly, gorbels' pyrophoric gas can be collected to make potions of fire breath, and their rubbery hides, if harvested intact, can be used to make lighter-than-air craft.

Lurking Strangler

Classification: Aberration (3E)
Challenge Rating: 2 (3E)
Alignment: Lawful Evil

Much like how humans may take monkeys as companions, some beholders keep these flying eyeballs as pets that resemble themselves.

Eye Beams: They can fire rays that act as the cause fear and sleep spells.
Faceless Eye: They're just a pair of free-flying eyeballs, bound together by a cord of muscles
Sinister Suffocation: A lurking strangler can use its three-foot-long strand of striated muscle as a garrote, causing a helpless victim — such as someone hit by its sleep ray — to die of suffocation in three rounds.
Starfish Language: The creatures are smart enough to understand Beholder and Common, they just have no verbal means of communication. Instead they twist their bodies, with a wide-open posture signifying assent or a spiral denoting disagreement or tension, for example.

Oculorb

Classification: Aberration (5E)
Challenge Rating: 8 (5E)
Alignment: Chaotic Evil

Masses of eyeballs and negative emotions, spawned when the Far Realm influences a dreaming beholder.

Counter-Attack: They can make an "Obsessive Rebuke" against anything that hurts them, retaliating with psychic damage.
Emotion Bomb: An oculorb is essentially "a tangle of negative emotions — the fury, melancholy, and obsession of its creator, all given gruesome, corporeal form." The creatures can weaponize this by focusing on enemies, immobilizing them with despair or scourging their minds with terror.
Faceless Eye: They're basically a collection of different-sized and -shaped eyeballs.
Horrifying the Horror: Oculorbs are feared even by the beholders who unintentionally birth them.

Characters / Dungeons And Dragons Beholderkin

True Beholders

Beholderkin

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Characters / Dungeons And Dragons Beholderkin

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True Beholders

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