Beholder (GruntHack)
e beholder 
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|---|---|
| Difficulty | 11 |
| Attacks |
Gaze 0d0 slow, Gaze 2d25 sleep, Gaze 0d0 disintegrate, Gaze 0d0 petrification, Gaze 2d4 cancellation, Bite 2d4 physical |
| Base level | 6 |
| Base experience | ? |
| Speed | 3 |
| Base AC | 4 |
| Base MR | 0 |
| Alignment | −10 (chaotic) |
| Frequency (by normal means) | 2 (Quite rare) |
| Genocidable | Yes |
| Weight | 800 |
| Nutritional value | 200 |
| Size | medium |
| Resistances | cold resistance, shock resistance, poison resistance |
| Resistances conveyed | poison resistance |
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A beholder:
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- For other implementations of the monster, see beholder.
A beholder, e, is a type of monster that appears in GruntHack. The beholder is a large, mindless eye creature that is capable of flight and can be seen via infravision.
A beholder has a slowing gaze attack, a sleep-inducing gaze, a disintegration gaze, a gaze that inflicts stoning, a cancellation gaze, and a bite attack. Beholders possess cold resistance, shock resistance and poison resistance.
Eating a beholder corpse or tin has a chance of granting poison resistance.
Generation
Randomly generated beholders are always created hostile. They are not a valid polymorph form.
A randomly generated beholder will be created asleep 4⁄5 of the time unless the hero has the Amulet of Yendor at the time of its generation.
Strategy
Beholders pose a significant threat from the time they can generate randomly: most beholders will generate asleep, but an awakened one will direct its many deadly gazes at you, which can turn you to stone instantly, disintegrate you, or cancel your inventory among other undesirable effects—worse yet, reflection has no effect on any of them. Thankfully, blinding yourself or the beholder will disable its gaze attacks, leaving the much weaker bite to contend with: telepathy cannot detect beholders as they are mindless, making warning the ideal means of spotting one ahed of time. The beholder's multiple methods of inflicting instadeath also makes them an enticing genocide target.
Origin
The beholder is a well-known creature from Dungeons & Dragons, and is one of the franchise's most iconic original creations. Beholders have spherical bodies with a single large eye, ten smaller eyes on stalks above it, and a mouth full of teeth. The smaller eyes are used for offense or defense; each one has a different magical ability. Beholders are typically hostile to other creatures, and often hostile to one another.
