Rich Morris' Comics - YAFGC and The ComixBlog

Maybe they can turn in all directions? *shrug* The guy is huge, ancient and has glimpses of the future. I'm sure he has ways to work around any purely physical problems.

I do not remember the Great Mother, not even a hint of her. Is this second edition or third?

If he wants to have use of that eyes and unless parts of his body are transparent, he must either roll or apply mirrors.

Beholders have no issue with rolling. Unlike most wingless flying critters, Beholders fly through an unknown natural process. For some inexplicable reason probably related to their alien natures Beholders are naturally bouyant; if you kill a beholder its corpse will just float around for about 12 hours or so before it finally runs out of floaty, the organs can be removed and will float around on their own too.

They move by expelling air through spiracles on their hides and the rules explicitly limit how many eyestalks they can have pointing in one direction at any one time.

So if he wants to the Beholder King could quite easily just roll forward and bring all his eyes to bear at once except for his main one.

Possibly the Beholders produce large quantities of a buoyant gas and store it inside of them. They could then use their power of telekinesis or some other mechanism to stabilize themselves, in addition to expelling jets of air for movement. *shrug*



Behold: the Great Mother. Looks like she's been around for about twenty years. Which edition would that be...?

Lords of Madness is a third edition book and as far as i am aware it's the first book to take an in-depth look at Aberrations. I don't think any of the Aberrations ever got a real ecology and physiology article in prior editions, though i could be wrong as i'm not very familiar with 2nd and 1st edition and whatnot.

Again referencing Lords of Madness, Grell and Beholder tissue is just naturally bouyant. Their flight is an Extraordinary ability, not Spell-Like or Supernatural and is described as being the result of the creatures being non-native to the material plane and thus operating on slightly different physical laws.

The book doesn't bother explaining precisely why Beholder and Grell tissue is naturally bouyant, just that it is.

Beholders move by literally just breathing out. Their bodies are covered in spiracles which they use to breathe, in order to move they simply breathe in in the direction they want to move and then breathe out in the opposite direction, thanks to their lack of friction and Newton's laws this causes them to float in the chosen direction.

Pretty sure Great Mother has been around since at least second edition.

Yeah, 2E was the high point for interesting fluff text. Might be in the book that dealt with monster deities.

I got most of my information on Beholders (and a lot of info I rejected because it wasn't funny enough) from the "I, Tyrant" book. A 2nd edition supplement that was part of a series that included "The Sea Devils" (about the Sahuagin) and one about the Illithid whose name eludes me at the moment.

"I,Tyrant" details their physiology, their reproductive style, culture, history, and all the kin and variants (including aberrations). The Beholder King is loosely based on the "Hive Mother" form with sunken eyestalks, and the insanity of the "Great Mother."

The books states that while the titles are generally female (Priestesses, mothers, etc) the creatures themselves are hermaphrodites. The feminine nouns and pronouns were given by an Elven scholar from a matriarchal society and gender is meaningless.

I had created Bob, his parents and the Beholder King before I read this (or cared about such things) and so ignored that fact. Although Bob and the other YAFGC Beholders are also hermaphroditic (sexless or neutral is obviously not the case with the randy beasts I've been writing), they appear to select a gender to adopt as their public identity. Then grow mustaches and wear monacles.

That would be the "Illithiad", or maybe was it "Dawn of the Overmind"? One's a sourcebook, and the other is the attendant adventure module.

Amusingly, this is basically what an Elder Orb is; really big, powerful, immortal (doesn't die from old age) Beholder. They don't have the Hive Mother ability to mind control other Beholders, but they wield enough power that they can often simply intimidate lesser Beholders into working with them.

Monocles on the central eye only or tiny monocles for each eyestalk? The question must be answered, preferably via visual proof!

Err... http://yafgc.net/?id=5

It's not a monocle, it's a sort of glasses. Or maybe "glass" would be more appropriate.

Yes, of course, because it's a mono-glass Or, literrary -- a mon-ocle (mono-oculaire)