Any ties between Beholders and Mindflares?

[MarkVIIIMarc]

Somehow I keep wanting to tie them in together as enemies or some version of kindred creatures battling the humanoid races.

Is there any lore or back story supporting this? We're about that point in a campaign I need to up my bad guys to something world challenging so I'm looking at them.

[Chronos]

There's a lot of very complicated fluff and backstory behind mindflayers. Roughly speaking, in the far distant future, descendants of humans evolved themselves to live forever, and to focus their intellects to perfection, by becoming all brain, and then traveled back into the distant past to make the changes to the timeline to make this transformation possible.

Beholder lore has changed in recent years, but I think the current lore is that a god had a nightmare, and then the god's nightmare itself had more nightmares, and those nightmares given form are the beholder race.

That said, although their origins and goals are completely different, there's plenty of precedent for both of them, as well as aboleths, working together when it's to their mutual advantage.

[iTreeby]

Beholders are xenophobic to the point that they hate everything except Beholders, they also hate Beholders for being different than themselves. That being said they will work with lesser races to get an advantage on their rivals. illithids probably wouldn't be down to work for a beholder unless an elder brain told them to. Illithids are extremely cowardly, so they might work with a beholder short term to get away from it. The only things they have in common are "alien intelligence", xenophobia, and the fact that they are aberrations.

[Nifft]

Somehow I keep wanting to tie them in together as enemies or some version of kindred creatures battling the humanoid races.

Is there any lore or back story supporting this? We're about that point in a campaign I need to up my bad guys to something world challenging so I'm looking at them.

Both were created by the Daeklyrs to serve specific roles -- the Beholders are obedient artillery, and the Mind Flayers are top-rank domain managers. They have different roles, but they can cooperate quite effectively, if they are assigned to do so.

(That's in Eberron, of course, which had one writer and thus was allowed to be both coherent and consistent. Your setting may vary.)

[Millstone85]

One tie-in is the creature that I am currently using as my avatar.

https://i.imgur.com/tXGzwD1.png

The mindwitness, which got an entry in Volo's Guide to Monsters. This is the result of successful ceremorphosis on a beholder, and a very useful "telepathic hub" for any illithid colony.

Also, the DMG says that "aberrations such as mind flayers and beholders are either from [the Far Realm] or shaped by its strange influence", so that's another connection in current lore.

[Wizard_Lizard]

In Eberron both of them are made by the Daelkyr, but eberron has slightly different lore from typical dnd.