Truly Lovecraftian Beholders

(Alternate title: "Heyeward Peepers Lensscleraft's Cat")

Disclaimer: I do not unreservedly endorse using any of this in actual play. It's but a thought experiment, with certain downsides to it -- see the last section.

I have seen Beholders described as: Lovecraftian abominations with horrifyingly gibbous eldritch cyclopean* physical features as found in Lovecraft's oeuvre, but also with the horrifyingly racist mental features found in actual human HP Lovecraft.

*Fun fact: 'cyclopean', in English (probably, but not entirely necessarily, as Lovecraft uses it), only means 'large', specifically pertaining to large stone blocks. Similarly, 'cyclops' in the Greek doesn't even mean 'one-eye', it means 'wheel-eye' or 'round-eye'. The sort of multiple-entendre meaning here, because it is a much-favored Lovecraftian word and calls to mind creatures with one large eyeball, is but a fortuitous coincidence.

What would that look like if we took it very seriously? Why might we do it like that?

Beholders are traditionally, like, hate everyone who isn't themself. They just about tolerate other beholders who look and act exactly like themself; the set of {lesser organisms} starts at beholders who look even slightly different and goes on down to, like, earthworms.

A good thing about this is that racism is clearly villainous, and making horrific aberrations who are bad guys racist is clearly of value to reinforce that.

One downside to this is that it lends credence to the kind of person who says "I'm not racist, I hate everyone equally", which is dumb and bad in various ways and for various reasons.

Another is that beholders are cool, or at least look cool, so they run into the same problem as, say, Nazis in stylish uniforms.

An upside to leaning into Lovecraft's goofily over-the-top racism specifically is that it makes beholders less cool. Racism can be better tolerated by the audience when the racists are otherwise cool, but making it over-the-top gonzo stupid makes it harder to tolerate. In general, it is didactically powerful when villainy is not just evil, but also stupid and goofy.

Lovecraft's Cat and the Eigenslur

HP Lovecraft was so stupidly goofily racist that he named his cat the N-slur, with the hard R. Should, perhaps, beholders be so stupidly goofily racist that they keep pets named with the fantasy equivalent of the N-slur? Which raises the question: what's the fantasy equivalent of the N-slur?

Intuitively to me the N-slur (with the hard R, as used by non-Black people) is equivalent in power and malice to the R-slur for the mentally handicapped, the F-slur for gay persons, probably the C-slur for women and the K-slur for Jewish persons, etc. (Notwithstanding a dispute over the equivalence or non-equivalence of these terms recently culminating in the ouster of the governing body of a local high school**.)

Eigenvalue is a thing that I don't 100% understand, but, basically, the eigenvalue of a thing is its essence, that which remains unchanged when the thing is otherwise transformed. (I figured 'eigen' was some guy's name, but no, it's just a German word for 'own'.)

The eigenslur, I am told, is what we call what you have left when you subtract Blackness from the N-slur, mental handicap from the R-slur, homosexuality from the F-slur, etc. -- reflecting the fundamental similarity between these slurs. The eigenslur is the core essence of the most maliciously hateful fightin' words.

So, to do this properly, we may need to come up with words that take the eigenslur and add human-ness, orc-ness, elf-ness, etc.

My first instinct for orcs is vird, from 'viridis', meaning 'green'. But probably your higher-intensity slurs should come from Germanic, not Latin, because Germanic-origin words are typically seen as stronger and more emphatic in English, but 'vird' might strip out enough of the obvious Latin-ness as to be strong. Or we could just go straight for the German 'grün' -- my instinct then is grunk, but that might be a little too cutesy to be obviously a partaking of the eigenslur.

Elves: unfortunately, all the words for 'elf' are cognate, even between Romance and Germanic languages. 'Baumficker' would be 'tree-effer'; 'Pflanzenficker' would be 'plant-effer'. Drop some syllables, call it flacker or maybe placker (plakker?).

Perhaps every beholder has a pet cat or similar lifeform. Or perhaps some beholders have, like, pet sapient creatures? But whom they name with various instantiations of the eigenslur? But never actual applicable slurs -- Lovecraft of course didn't name his cat a slur for cat, he named his cat a slur for a disfavored race of human. So it'd be, like, a pet elf named Grunk or a pet orc named Plakker, never an elf named Plakker nor an orc named Grunk.

We could of course do a beholder with a pet tiefling, orc, or drow, or a pet something else named with the eigenslur-instantiation for one of those, or (best of all) a pet one of those named with the slur for another of those. And then compare and contrast the stupid goofy racism of the beholder with the more everyday racism facing those species from regular humanfolk!

**I have been told, by a local teacher, that the original impetus for the hullaballoo involved a Black student calling another student the R-slur, which a teacher informed them was equivalent to somebody else calling the Black student the N-slur, and the Black principal fired the teacher about it, and there was mass uproar and protests in support of the teacher, ultimately leading to the (forced?) resignation of the principal and most (all?) of the board of directors.

Why Maybe Not In Actual Play

I have encountered the claim that, just as sexual assault has no place in a D&D game, neither does racism or slavery. Melanistically-well-endowed persons deal with enough racism in their day-to-day lives, making the D&D villains racist too just risks triggering trauma. I can see why this position might be compelling -- mostly by analogy to how compelled I am by the argument that sexual assault is verboten.

That said, I don't actually fully 100% buy it. As long as racism (and slavery) is not good or well-tolerated in the D&D world, as long as it is clearly villainous and evil, I think it's fine -- especially if you only have white people at your table; this is something to ask any people of other races at your table during Session Zero. I think a white player experiencing annoying racism because they're playing a non-human (or even because they're playing human, but the campaign brings their character amongst other species) can be didactically powerful -- one of my favorite D&D experiences as a player was my Drow Paladin of Bahamut, in the Forgotten Realms, who kept getting racism'd at by everybody she encountered, which got old and tedious real fast and thereby enlightened me more than all the critical race books and articles in the world.

Having a beholder with a 'pet' sapient creature is of course slavery, and (even if we're okay with slavery in the game) do we want to be drawing analogy between pets and slavery? Cats domesticated themselves; dogs and humans co-domesticated each other, but for any other kind of domesticated pet/livestock/plant, the slavery comparison is more apt than we might be comfortable with. Of course, we don't want to say that slavery is fine because it compares to domestication/taming which is fine; the more accurate thing is that domestication/taming is unfine because it compares to slavery which is unfine, but drawing the comparison will still be seen by many to be unfairly diminishing the terribleness of slavery, unfairly embiggening the terribleness of domestication/taming, or both. Maybe we don't want to get into that discursive morass, even if the entity doing the enslavement/taming is explicitly an evil racist aberration.

Another concern, possibly one which only I might have, is that deploying the eigenslur might conceivably corrode the soul, even fictionally partaking of fictional instantiations of the eigenslur. I haven't even fully formed or explored this notion in my own head, let alone enough to convince anybody else that it's anything like a real concern, but it very slightly gives me pause.

Relatedly, there are maybe concerns that we might not want to minimize the eigenslur by partaking of fictional instantiations of it for the purpose of goofiness. About this I ask: why would we not want to weaken the impact of the eigenslur? Under what plausible non-evil circumstance would we want the eigenslur to remain maximally powerful?

A pretty good reason not to, on the other hand, is because beholders look cool, and we don't want racism to look cool by association, and moreover I like using beholder iconography in my personal life (I've got a beholder keychain, my laptop is festooned with googly eyes and is named Beholder, and so on), and I don't necessarily want it to become widely recognized that beholders are synonymous with stupid goofy racism, lest I find myself tied to stupid goofy racism.***

***I'm not about to get a beholder tattoo, of course. Especially if I were ever planning on running for public office. (Topical! Or should I say, totenkopfical?)

Non-Human Animals in D&D 3.5e

This post is aimed primarily at a lay audience, and therefore I'll be defining a lot of terms that many of my readers will already be familiar with and take for granted.

In this post, I will default to the style of capitalizing in-game terms with defined meanings. This is most relevant example is the difference between animals (the normal scientific real-world definition of "members of the animal kingdom") and Animals (the D&D 3.5e definition of "members of the Animal Type").

--- Introduction

In Dungeons and Dragons, one rarely encounters actual living animals, except when a local cat elects to leap up on the table to play with the dice and miniatures. However, the game's treatment of fictional animals reflects our thoughts about real animals, and is thus worth contemplating.

--- Animals and Types

In D&D 3.5, all nouns are either Creatures, Objects, or Conditions. (There's some debate as to which category some things fall into and whether a thing can be both -- for example, it's not entirely clear whether a corpse is an Object or simply a Creature with the Dead condition. While it is clear that Intelligent Items are Creatures, it's not clear whether or not they are also Objects.) Note that the Creature/Object dichotomy is not the same as the Living/Nonliving dichotomy -- there are nonliving Creatures (such as zombies and golems), and there are living Objects (such as trees and bushes). A Creature is defined as anything with a Wisdom and Charisma score. A Condition is something that affects a Creature or Object, such as Paralysis or Disease.

Of the fifteen Types in D&D (Aberration, Animal, Construct, Dragon, Elemental, Fey, Giant, Humanoid, Magical Beast, Monstrous Humanoid, Ooze, Outsider, Plant, Undead, and Vermin), all real-world animals, past and present, are distributed between three: Animal, Humanoid, and Vermin.

The only real-world animals with the Humanoid Type are humans and neanderthals (Neanderthals are treated as somewhat of an afterthought in the D&D canon, mentioned only in one of many supplements, so I will mostly treat them as an afterthought as well). Other Humanoids include elves, orcs, dwarves (which are distinct from dwarfs), gnomes, halflings, and so on.

Vermin comprise, more or less, invertebrates. Most Vermin species are fictional, including such varieties as spiders, centipedes, and scorpions ranging from Tiny (the size of cats, just this side of realistic for some examples) to Colossal (the size of a smallish house). Vermin are often Mindless, which means they have no Intelligence score. More on that later.

The Animal type comprises, more or less, all real-world non-human animals, past or present. There are a few fictional species in the Animal type, mostly limited to the Dire Animal category (Dire Animals being creatures that are larger and stronger than their regular counterparts, but which still have the traits and features of Animals). From cats, dogs, and horses to apes, sharks, elephants, squids, and so on, the Animal type is what I will mostly be concentrating on today.

There are some animals that might not be considered Creatures at all. Tapeworms, for example, are not (to the best of my knowledge) given statistics or game effects anywhere in published materials, but if they were, I would lay at least even odds that it would be treated as a Disease (i.e., a Condition) and not a Creature.

The most salient trait of the Animal type is "Intelligence score of 1 or 2 (no Creature with an Intelligence score of 3 or higher can be an Animal)." (I could also run with "Alignment: Always Neutral", but that would make for a much more ethics-heavy post.)

--- Animals and Intelligence

In D&D 3.5, every creature has six Ability Scores: Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. The most morally salient of these scores is Intelligence (and, to a lesser extent, Wisdom), so this is what I will be concentrating on.

"Intelligence determines how well your character learns and reasons." It also determines how many languages you know (a Creature with an Intelligence of 2 or lower knows no languages; most Creatures with an Intelligence of 12 or higher knows more than one language.)

"Wisdom describes a character’s willpower, common sense, perception, and intuition. While Intelligence represents one’s ability to analyze information, Wisdom represents being in tune with and aware of one’s surroundings. [...] If you want your character to have acute senses, put a high score in Wisdom. Every creature has a Wisdom score."

Humans have ability scores ranging in a bell curve from 3 (abysmal) to 18 (just this side of superhuman), with the mode, median, and and mean being 10. The most common method for generating ability scores for normal humans is to roll 3d6 -- which is to say, roll three 6-sided dice and add the results together. This approximates the given range and average. (Exceptional humans -- such as most player characters -- use other methods. Non-humans use the above method and then add Racial Modifiers to some Abilities and subract Racial Modifiers from others. For example, an elf adds 2 to their Dexterity but subtracts 2 from their Constitution, so an elf would have 5-20 Dexterity but 1-16 Constitution.) (Intelligence, being a range with a bell curve, can be mapped to IQ, but doing so is beyond the scope of this post.)

A Creature can have a Nonability in some score, which is usually indicated by "--" or "Ø". A Creature that cannot move, for example, has a nonability in Dexterity and Strength. A Creature that is not alive (such as a zombie) has no Constitution. A Creature that cannot think and is as an automaton has an Intelligence nonability. (Note that this is distinct from having 0 in an Ability. A Creature never naturally has 0 in an Ability, but it can have its Abilities reduced to 0 through Ability Damage or Ability Drain -- in which case it is paralyzed, unconscious, or dead, depending on the Ability affected.)

Which brings me back to "Intelligence score of 1 or 2 (no Creature with an Intelligence score of 3 or higher can be an Animal)." If an Animal should gain Intelligence of 3 or higher by any means (usually magic), it ceases to be an Animal (the rules are unclear on what it becomes, but many players hold the interpretation that it becomes a Magical Beast). Similarly, Vermin are usually Mindless (they techniacally can have Intelligence scores, and can even have Intelligence in excess of 2, but all published Vermin have a nonability in Intelligence), meaning they are no better than automatons.

This means two things with which I intend to take issue: First, that the most intelligent Animal is considered less intelligent than the least intelligent human; second, that the wide range of animal intellects is confined to the range of --, 1, and 2, whereas the (perhaps relatively narrow) range of human intellects is given the broader numerical range of 3-18.

Dogs, octopuses, corvids, parrots, monkeys and apes, elephants, dolphins, and rats are all widely considered very intelligent, capable of tool use, complex communication, and problem solving -- quite probably more intelligent than many very young or severely handicapped humans. And yet these creatures are all considered to have the absurdly low Intelligence score of 2.

Bees are hardly automatons, being capable of complex "dance" to communicate the precise location of desirable food sources. Other eusocial insects, such as ants, termites, and some wasps, are similarly gifted in organization. Some spiders are capable of weaving complex webs in unlikely places, or of lying in ambush. A defense of the "Vermin are Mindless" school of thought might be to observe that these behaviors are instinctual, preprogrammed into these animals by evolution, and not learned -- which is probably fair, and I don't know that I have a strong position on the subject one way or the other.

The numerical range of --, 1, and 2 is much narrower than the numerical range of 3-18. The game's focus is, naturally, on playable characters, so it makes sense that the range of human experience would be given finer degrees of distinction than the range of animal experience, but I would argue that the difference between the least intelligent human and the most intelligent human is less great than the difference in intellect between, say, a leech and an elephant.

The Wisdom of published animals, on the other hand, ranges from 8 to 17 (with an average of just over 13), so the general consensus at Wizards of the Coast appears to be that the average Animal is wiser than the average Human (though the wisest human is slightly wiser than the wisest Animal). This undoubtedly has something to do with Wisdom's connection to the senses -- many animals certainly have a variety of keener senses than humans do. It likely also reflects the perception that animals are more "in tune" with nature than most humans are (Wisdom is the primary ability score for Druids and Rangers, the two classes designed around being in tune with nature).

--- Animals as Trade Goods and Carrying Capacity

Animals also appear in the section Wealth and Money, under Trade Goods. In the same chart as "one pound of wheat", "one square yard of linen" and "one pound of platinum" are entries such as "one chicken", "one pig", and "one ox". This serves to emphasize the use of animals as objects, rather than subjects.

Similarly, it is possible to buy a mule to carry your loot. With a carrying capacity of up to 690 pounds and a cost of only 8 gold pieces (less than a pound of saffron or a flask of acid), mules are among the best methods to carry stuff around (until you start picking up extradimensional storage space like Bags of Holding and Portable Holes). This reflects their use for this purpose in the real world, but barely acknowledges their status as living beings, much less their status as beings of moral concern.

--- Animal Companions, Special Mounts, and Familiars

Some Classes gain a companion animal as a class feature. Druids and Rangers gain Animal Companions, Paladins gain Special Mounts, and Sorcerers and Wizards gain Familiars. These all begin as regular Animals but gain features as the character with which they are associated levels up.

Animal Companions are drawn from a list of Animals including wolves, owls, badgers, snakes, and so on, and never gain intelligence, though they gain strength in other ways.

Special Mounts begin as warhorses or warponies, but they are treated as Magical Beasts instead of Animals.

Familiars begin as animals such as bats, cats, owls, ravens, and weasels, but they become Magical Beasts when they become Familiars, and they gain, in addition to other abilities, Intelligence. This means that, at very high level, the Wizard's or Sorcerer's Familiar might wind up being among the most intelligent creatures in the party. And yet, despite being the most intelligent creature in the party, the Familiar still tends to be sidelined in favor of the main player characters.

--- Handle Animal and Wild Empathy

There are two main ways of interacting with Animals.

Most characters use the Handle Animal skill, which deals primarily with training animals to do Tricks (such as "Attack", "Heel", or "Track") and "pushing" them to do Tricks they don't know.

Druids and Rangers, on the other hand, can use their Wild Empathy class feature, which allows them to improve the disposition of Animals towards them, for example to make a Hostile Animal Friendly. This functions in the same way as the Diplomacy skill works on creatures with an Intelligence of 3 or higher.