The Beholder Lets Its Eyestalks Down

As you might expect, I've been watching with interest as Wizards of the Coast makes more and more of their Digital Initiative public. At some point I'll take up Gleemax, that puke green brain-in-a-jar monstrosity (in all fairness some kind designer told them to expand their color palette recently and they even appear to have listened), but today I want to deal with one of the most recent innovations in Dungeons & Dragons Insider: "The Beholder."

I've been disappointed in a lot of the content from Dragon and Dungeon since they passed out of Paizo's hands. I'm not saying it's bad... but at the very least it is very disappointing. Aside from one or two brilliant articles such as the "Demonomicon of Iggwilv," most of their content has been, frankly, dull. I miss being able to sit on the can reading Dragon, and I'm not afraid to admit it. Despite my personal wish to read things on the throne, I do value what technology can do and they seem to have finally done something innovative. After all of Wizard's assurances and a lovely editorial from Kim Mohan, one of the industry's most respected figures, that the folks running these successors to the print magazines knew what to do with the technology, I was beginning to despair that they would ever actually use some of the technology they claimed to be embracing. Then, on Halloween, they debuted "The Beholder."

The beholder feature is an animated cartoon of a candid interview with (you guessed it) a beholder. The beholder interview does a lot of things for Wizards - it tells us about the save or die effects (and their removal from the game in 4e), reassures us that we'll still see favorite creatures like the beholder and the owlbear (gotta love those magic moments), and tells us that beholders will be a solo monster (no more cities of the beasties, I guess). Hopefully it even manages to get a few laughs. More than that, it says that there is a chance, however slim it may seem at the moment, that Wizards of the Coast will actually start using those innovations that they've been assuring their fans for months now that they knew what to do with. I can hope...