Where Can I Find Beholder Variants For Homebrew Campaigns?

I geek out hard when a beholder shows up in a published adventure — there’s just something about those floating, paranoid eye-stalks that makes a session instantly memorable. If you want a clear, canonical place to find a major beholder antagonist, start with 'Waterdeep: Dragon Heist'. Xanathar is practically the poster-child beholder for the Forgotten Realms in 5th edition: he’s a crime lord, an obsessive collector, and one of the factional villain options the book gives you. Running Xanathar can turn an urban campaign into a delicious stew of espionage, weird schemes, and the constant paranoia of being watched by an eye that’s smarter than half your party. If you're more into dungeon-crawling, the spiritual and literal extension appears in 'Dungeon of the Mad Mage'. Undermountain is a sprawling megadungeon where beholders and beholder-cultists crop up in lore and encounters; Xanathar’s presence is threaded through the setting, too. Between these two books you get contrasting vibes: one’s a social-crime drama in the streets of Waterdeep, the other’s a claustrophobic, layered dungeon with beholder threats that feel properly dangerous. Beyond those obvious picks, beholders turn up in a bunch of other published materials across editions: classic Undermountain/Waterdeep supplements and later adventure expansions often add beholder lairs or syndicates as major antagonists. Third-party or older-edition modules sometimes center on single-eye tyrants, and a few Planescape-era adventures used beholders as political, planar, or mad-scientist villains — they make great puppetmasters because they’re both monstrous and weirdly bureaucratic. If you’re running a game, think about how a beholder’s paranoia drives plots: secret rooms, rival factions, double-crossing minions, and literal eye-spies everywhere. If you want a tighter shortlist to check first, look at 'Waterdeep: Dragon Heist' and 'Dungeon of the Mad Mage', then branch into Undermountain/Waterdeep supplements and older Undermountain adventures for more beholder-led stories. And if you ever want help reskinning Xanathar as an underground art collector or a paranoid scholastic genius, I’ve got ridiculous ideas that always make my table howl.