Game design exercise: You've been tasked with creating a non-trademark-infringing version of the beholder. The design brief specifies that your version should have ten creepy eyestalks with ten distinct magic powers, like the standard beholder, but these powers must not overlap with even one of the standard beholder powers.
For the purpose of this exercise, assume that the forbidden list consists of exactly the ten magic eyeball powers that are present in the Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition Monster Manual. (i.e., you don't need to research every magic eyeball power that's ever been attributed to a beholder in every iteration of D&D ever published.)
For reference, these ten powers are:
- Controls your mind
- Paralyses you
- Makes you afraid
- Slows you down
- Makes you weak
- General purpose telekinesis
- Puts you to sleep
- Turns you to stone
- Disintegration ray
- Just fucking kills you
These are all off limits.
So:
What ten magic eyeball powers do you give your legally-not-a-beholder?
Hmm, I think to make this hypothetical multi-eyed monster a bit more distinct, I’m going to focus more on the theme of sight/eyes in general. Here’s my ideas:
Farsight: Clearly sees things that are extremely far away.
Smallsight: Magnifies their vision to see things that are extremely tiny.
Nightsight: Sees clearly even in total darkness/obscuring stuff like thick fog or deep water
Clearsight: Sees through solid matter in an x-ray-like fashion
Spysight: Allows the being to see through the eyes of other creatures (if they have eyes).
Stealsight: Renders targets blind.
Madsight: Causes targets to see vivid, realistic illusions.
Mindsight: Peers through someone’s memories, basically mind-reading.
Truesight: Sees through illusions, disguises, and secret things like hidden traps and passages.
Blightsight: Causes countless clusters of lidless, bulging eyeballs to grow uncontrollably all over the flesh of their victims. They’re fully functional and feel pain just as natural eyes do.
And as long as I’m still on this ADHD-fueled creativity rush, I’m gonna go ahead and name this creature “Sightseer”, and whip up a sketch of what it might look like:
I was originally going to make it look like a pair of giant hands with eyeballs on the fingers, but I felt that “hands with eyes” was a bit overplayed in fantasy monster designs, so I flipped it around and made it look like a pair of giant eyeballed feet instead. I think it fits the “sightseer” name, since a sightseer typically walks around everywhere, and it makes it look all the more weird and freaky, perfect for an extra-dimensional abomination.
(and now I’ve written the word “sight” so many times it doesn’t look like a real word anymore)

