[RPG] What furniture does a beholder have in its personal quarters

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A beholder's lair is made up of several chambers and…

The farthest chamber from the entrance is the beholder’s personal quarters, where the creature sleeps and studies any magic treasure it has accumulated. (Lords of Madness 50)

…but that's pretty much all it says. I know that, given their iconic status, far more than what's in the Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 accessory Lords of Madness (2005) has been written about beholders, especially in Advanced Dungeons and Dragons, Second Edition, so someone must've been tasked with writing about a beholder's sleeping habits and its choice of furnishings.

According to Dungeons and Dragons canon, do beholders sleep in beds? If so, what sort of beds do they prefer? Do beholders make use of other furniture?


Background: While designing a beholder's lair, I realized I had no idea what furnishings a beholder would require. (No, I didn't get very far. Thanks for asking.) Specifically, I didn't know if a beholder would have a bed or if it would need a bed. Further, I don't know to what degree a beholder relies on its at-will 325-lb.-capacity telekinesis to manage its belongings. I know I would a lot.

I've tagged this question both and because, while this is question concerns a Dungeons and Dragons 3.5 campaign, canonical information from other editions of Dungeons and Dragons is acceptable if information from that edition is unavailable.

Best Answer

While the general section on beholders in Lords of Madness doesn't give any particulars of the furniture in the beholder's lair, there is an example lair detailed later in the chapter (page 56). I won't reproduce the whole thing here, but the important room for our purposes is the beholder's personal chamber:

This large chamber is quite impressive; the walls and ceiling are covered with intricate carvings depicting beholders eating humanoids, and vast fields of mushrooms with writhing tendrils. On the ceiling above, the image of a single immense beholder watches everything. Two large, uneven stalagmites protrude from the floor along the northeastern wall, and to the south stand several well-made statues of powerful-looking adventurers and fearsome monsters. In the center of the room sit numerous desks, each of which is covered with mounds of papers and books.

This chamber is Sekarvu’s personal lair, and where it spends the majority of its time.

There is no mention of a bed, or indeed any furniture beyond the desks. So either the beholder sleeps on a desk (face it, we all have occasionally), or it continues to levitate while it sleeps.

A possible source of further details on beholders would be the AD&D 2e book I, Tyrant, which was the book in the Monstrous Arcana series dedicated purely to beholders.