How do Beholders digest their food?

Angcuru

First Post

• Dec 25, 2004

• #1

Seriously. Their entire bodies are composed of eyes, a mouth, and presumably a large cranial cavity. So...how do they digest what they would eat with those ginormous mouths?

 

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Piratecat

Sesquipedalian

• Dec 25, 2004

• #2

Quickly. And effectively.

 

S

Staffan

Legend

• Dec 25, 2004

• #3

It's been a while since I read "I, Tyrant" (the 2e book about beholders), but I recall that they do have a relatively small stomach behind their mouths.

 

Angcuru

First Post

• Dec 25, 2004

• #4

I was figuring that they had an extradimensional pocket plane that their food was transported to once devoured, where it would be digested and used as a kind of nutrition resevoir.

 

shilsen

Adventurer

• Dec 25, 2004

• #5

Seriously? They stick the eye stalk with the disntegrate beam in their mouths and vaporize whatever they swallowed. That's why little beholders are told, "Never vaporize with your mouth full."

More seriously? Any which way you want it to. It's a fantasy monster, so there's no particular reason they need to digest things. If you want to rule that beholders never eat or that they have little spheres of annihilation in their stomachs or that you can track a beholder by the little floating dodecahedral droppings they leave behind, it's all equally plausible.

 

Turanil

First Post

• Dec 25, 2004

• #6

shilsen said:

Seriously? They stick the eye stalk with the disntegrate beam in their mouths and vaporize whatever they swallowed. That's why little beholders are told, "Never vaporize with your mouth full."

Click to expand...

I second this theory. This is what I was going to tell: they use their disintegrate eye of course...

 

Angcuru

First Post

• Dec 25, 2004

• #7

So, if they disintegrate their food and then inhale it, why do they have teeth?

 

Galethorn

First Post

• Dec 25, 2004

• #8

The same reason humans have tailbones, whales have pelvises, and so on; they're left over from evolution.

But that's just what I'd tell my PCs....the real reason would be that they make the beholder look scarier....I mean, what's more frightening; teeth, or just a big hole?

 

Scribble

First Post

• Dec 25, 2004

• #9

Angcuru said:

So, if they disintegrate their food and then inhale it, why do they have teeth?

Click to expand...

all the better to bite you with my dear.

 

Prince of Happiness

First Post

• Dec 25, 2004

• #10

They don't. They feed off the malice that they inflict on live prey.