Re: Metacultures

A Psh wrote:
> Hmm... Don't know for sure about this, though there is a Beholder god
Two, actually. There's Gzemnid, who you mentioned, and who was once a
mortal beholder; and then there's the Great Mother, who was the creator
of the beholder races. The Great Mother (who is highly intelligent with
a completely alien intelligence, highly chaotic, and who spends all of
her time gibbering and drifting endlessly-sort of reminds me of Azathoth
actually) spawned the first beholder, Kzamnal, and Kzamnal then gave
birth to other beholders (Gzemnid was in Kzamnal's first brood) and
instructed them to gather together all knowledge, "that the mortal
creatures might be like thier grandmother, the Great Mother, who knows
all." Most beholders believe that some of the Great Mother's children
gave birth to offspring that didn't resemble the Great Mother, thus
setting off the genocidal wars of the beholders. Scholars of Gzemnid, on
the other hand, believe that the Great Mother is so vast and complex
that she changes appearance from one moment to the next, and that she
lays eggs in batches, and each batch of eggs hatches mortal beholders
with whatever appearance the Great Mother had at the time she layed the
eggs.
> They are quite organically
> masterful themselves, apparently, because of all of the Beholder kin and
> abominations and such that they create.
Well, the beholder queens are the ones that create these abominations
and such. Your regular everyday beholder doesn't have the capability to
produce them, and wouldn't want to in any case.
> And there are even Beholder mages,
> though those are quite funky.
Of course, beholder mages are just regular beholders who have lost their
central eye (through accident or by design) and have learnt magic since
then.
> There are also the Gauths and Specators or whatever, Outer Planar Beholders
> from Mechanus (aka Nirvana) summoned to protect things. This might indicate
> some sort of divine origin for Beholders. (Are these the original watchers
> which then changed wildly to create the other strains?)
Not according to scholars. According to beholder scholars all
beholder-kin are the descendants of 'traitors' (in other words, they are
the descendants of true beholders who don't look the same as the
beholder talking). According to more neutral sages, beholder-kin are the
results of genetic mutation in true beholder mis-births. If these
mutations breed true (and, more importantly, if they manage to avoid
being destroyed by a furious parent) then they end up forming a breed of
beholder-kin. Beholder-kin (death kisses, eyes of the deep, gauth,
observers, and spectators) shouldn't be confused with beholder
abominations (directors, examiners, lensmen, overseers, and watchers),
because the former were accidentally created, and breed true, while the
latter are intentionally created by beholder queens, and are sterile.

--
The most merciful thing in all the world, I think, is the inability of
the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island
of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not
meant that we should voyage far.