Every Angel is Terrifying...

Reskinning the Beholder

This is an attempt to reskin Dungeons & Dragons classic weird and terrifying monster the Beholder in a way that works for less generic fantasy settings… Instead of a floating arcane eye with stalks that each shoot magical rays, I’ve written the creature up as a Galagalim, the strangest of the order of angels… The “wheels within wheels” of biblical tradition.  Angels in RPGs are best if they are the angels of Rilke … “Every angel is terrifying […] almost deadly birds of the soul, [who] perilous, from behind the stars, [takes] even one step down toward us:  our own heart, beating higher and higher, would beat us to death.”

I don't hate beholders as a monster - they are incredibly charming, but like most of the original D&D monsters they are themselves a meme, or at least iconic enough to be very well-known, and so more likely to create furious flights of metagaming rather then wonder among players who encounter them. This is itself an interesting theory question - "what do we want players to experience from monsters?" On the one hand there is the excitement and fear of the novel ... and on the other there is the joy of learning the game, of players able to develop a set of knowledge about creatures and their abilities, because D&D monsters are shared and known phenomenon.

I still remember many of the statlines (or at least the special abilities, weakness, HD and AC ranges from pouring over the 1E monster manual as a child, and having this sort of knowledge was valued as part of player skill by some parts of the OSR and continues to be in the POSR, especially among those aiming for "revival", or playing RPGs as closely as possible to the RAW or the the playstyle "intended" in the 1970's or 1980's. This is an interesting exercise, and an interesting approach to player skill - where knowledge of the game's rule text is essential for character survival and player success. I suspect it is very close to the way that old games were played in the first few decades of the hobby (at least it is similar to how we played them as children), and it does offer an interesting approach to challenge, where player knowledge of monsters (also magic items and spells) acts as a sort of substitute for character knowledge of the game world. Personally though I have always followed the other OSR approach, the idea that challenge should be novel and unknowable to the players without their characters' observing, scouting, listening to rumors , guessing and trying out schemes. Monsters should inspire fear and wonder, with the limitation that their special abilities and weaknesses should be discernible, or at least not contrary, to their description and appearance. In the case of "Biblically accurate angels", they make good stand-ins for the more terrifying and dangerous D&D creatures. In this case the weirdest o these, Ezekiel 1:15–21's "ophanim" or "galagalim " the beholder is ideal.

Below are the stats and description of a Galagalim, a celestial wheel or sphere, written up for OSE or similar B/X D&D clones.

Galagalim (Celestial Wheel)
A servant of the Celestial Thrones, pulled from the eternal choir to serve the Imperial war machine. This divine being has escaped its entrapment, but it remains here - lost in the painfully protean terrestrial universe. To approach it is to inflict pain on it through change and disorder. It will respond in kind, sating its hunger for beauty through destruction.