Dungeons & Dragons: How To Build A Beholder’s Lair As A DM In DnD
How To Build A Beholder’s Lair As A DM In DnD – Hearing the name “Beholder” might give you the chills, regardless of whether you’ve played Dungeons & Dragons before or not. These horrifying beings are the stuff of legends, even making it to the official Monster Manual’s cover. Setting up a meeting with one of these creatures can be a fantastic adventure all by itself for a dungeon master.
No two encounters will be the same because of the nature and variety of these monsters. This implies that you might construct your Beholder’s lair the same way each time and still perhaps achieve a different result in combat. The success of your players depends on a variety of factors, but as a DM, you have a lot of control on how difficult an encounter with one of these dangerous creatures is.
Basics Before Building – How To Build A Beholder’s Lair As A DM In DnD
When you decide that it is time for your party to confront a member of the Beholderkind, there are a few things you should know to assist you decide which of the three Beholder Variants is best for your group. If you make use of the Challenge Rating system, this procedure is somewhat simplified.
If you are unfamiliar with Challenge Rating, it is a straightforward system for categorising encounter difficulty that is based on the average level and base player count of four people. (For instance, a creature with a Challenge Rating of 5 is best suited for an encounter with four level 5 players.)
There are three varieties of Beholderkind, each with a very distinct Challenge Rating. Knowing these can be useful, but there are occasions when CR alone is insufficient to predict the outcome of your encounter. As a DM, you must take other factors into account to determine which of these versions is most suited for fight against your party.
Once you have the answers to these questions, you can choose which version your party should encounter by considering its powers, location, and CR.
You can modify your encounter anyway you see fit depending on whether you have players who are higher or lower in level.
Setting The Scene
You must choose the site of the lair after determining which of these variations will be most effective in combat against your team. The lair itself increases the creature’s power and the difficulty of the encounter for Death Tyrants and Beholders. On the other side, spectators do not acquire unique lair traits or area impacts.
Beholders and Death Tyrants’ ego drives them to the peripheries and foundation of civilisation, respectively. They go to caves, cliff homes, or abandoned places to find solitude. Within a mile of where their lair is located, both of these enemies will alter the local ecosystem. The majority of these modifications give organisms the impression that they are being observed, produce little reality distortions, etc. In Death Tyrant lairs, adjacent creatures may haphazardly be electrocuted by one of its eye rays.
Don’t be reluctant to bring up these points. Some players won’t notice these alterations, but for others, they can add to their sense of dread for what’s to come in the encounter.
Beholders
The depth of the terrain will be the most crucial factor in the lair you construct. Beholders thrive in environments with high, soaring ceilings, where they can hover above their prey and avoid close-quarters battle. It is best to stay away from melee combat at all costs because Beholderkind is vulnerable to it. This means that when you describe the lair itself, make careful to picture your Beholder hovering hundreds of feet above the gathering. When building their lair, many Beholders tunnel through these voids, using their disintegrating eye beam to join vertical tunnels with void chambers in order to eliminate any blind spots where troublesome heroes may lurk in the shadows.
The Beholder’s lair operations, aside from these tunnels, are focused on trapping players in the open so they can be more easily attacked without coming within melee range. Some will grapple or blast with spectral eye rays or appendages, while others might make treacherous terrain. Make sure there aren’t any weapons or the remains of slain heroes nearby so that players can’t use them to get around your traps to make the encounter more challenging. In order to accommodate more traps or more room as you see proper, each lair can be customised to the personality of the Beholder you construct.
Even the design of the lair might be influenced by the fact that some Beholders are known to capture and enslave other species.