Magical miscreants against a church full of secrets.
Beholder's Eye is a Dungeons & Dragons actual play set on the Great Isle, where Murad Hall raids the countryside, the zealous Red Hand terrorize their opponents, and a church conclave moves to regulate magic. Alex runs the game as dungeon master, and the players respond with schemes, disguises, rules checks and a steady run of jokes.
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Beholder's Eye is a Dungeons & Dragons actual play hosted by Alex, who also runs the game as dungeon master. The campaign is set on the Great Isle, and a spoken preamble lays out the island's troubles plainly. Murad Hall raids the countryside. The Grand Abbot has called a conclave to regulate the use of magic, and the zealous Red Hand terrorize anyone who opposes their doctrine. Emperor Simon of Crux and Queen Alanya of Thalmor, once enemies, are now betrothed. Into that mix goes a party billed as the magical miscreants. The roster includes Rosie, a gnome artificer and bard with a much longer full name; Gerim Kelsor, a high elf bladesinger; Mole Urzog, an orc forge cleric of Saint Allegist; and Cal, a satyr bard of eloquence. Sessions open with a ritual: Alex asks who wants to recap the last episode, and a player brings the table back into the story. The endings have a pattern too, as Alex lands on a final image or a loaded line of dialogue and then calls the episode. The story here keeps circling religion and what hides behind it. The Church of St. Miriam offers the party a place beside it at the conclave, on one condition: they must kill Morla, a Tortle who ranks high in the Red Hand. The players hedge rather than commit. An archbishop turns out to have been communing with something called the Great Mother, and similar statues surface in more than one room, until the players start asking aloud whether the church serves Theos at all. Then there is Samael, a skinless figure surrounded by something likened to a halo crossed with a dreamcatcher, who speaks to Rosie directly in her head. The scheming is just as lively. Lynn goes on posing as the Grand Abbot while the rest head to the library of Saint Archon for a breastplate kept in a glass case on a raised dais, and once it is in hand the talk turns to recreating it, with a joke that nobody who visits libraries these days would recognize it anyway. Much of the appeal is how loose the table is: players check room dimensions, read out the text of items such as boots of the winding path, and total damage and bonus actions in the middle of a fight. They lose track of who knows what, sort it out on the spot, and swear when the plot turns on them. Some episode titles lean on flesh, from 'The Flesh Path' to 'A.P.U's Fleshy Saviour'. Editing is credited to Alexander Floyd, and the music is drawn from Creative Commons tracks, several of them by Kevin MacLeod.
Made for: Suits a listener who wants a serialized Dungeons & Dragons campaign built around religious conspiracy, disguises and a relic theft, and who enjoys hearing a table work through rules and tangents in real time.
What sets it apart: Its story centers on church politics: a conclave to regulate magic, an impersonated Grand Abbot and hidden worship of the Great Mother. It is played at a loose, conversational table where rules lookups, recaps and side jokes stay in the recording.
Beholder's Eye
A flesh-dimension angel wants to go home; you're here for the party's suspiciously polite interrogation.
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Short reviews from the PlayNext desk, based on the episodes we processed.
A paralyzed Rosie, a trapped breastplate, and a green-cloaked solution give this library crisis its live-table snap.
Rosie's attempt to lift the breastplate from the library turns into a boxed-in crisis when a shriek leaves her paralyzed, still holding it in a five-by-five room.
A magical disguise plan turns shaky improvisation into an office-door cliffhanger.
Beholder's Eye frames infiltration as a costumed group problem, with Lynn remaining as the Grand Abbot to inspect the chamber and gather information while the others move toward the Library of Saint Archon museum.
A muddy cleanup leads to Rosie's telepathic encounter with the skinless figure called Samael.
After the Archbishop's defeat, the party's cleanup becomes a grubby custodial scramble: guards turned to stone, bodies sunk in mud, and a frog still important enough to detain and carry along.
A risky teleportation play throws the Magical Miscreants into divine fire, church secrets, and lively table-level improvisation.
A split party, a library fight, and a risky teleportation play drop the Magical Miscreants into a battle that is already underway. The episode shifts from church secrets and the stolen statue's tie to the Great Mother into a confrontation with a planetar, where spell effects,…
A secret basement turns the party's lore debate into a live question about how divine power works.
A secret basement, a captive Piatra, and an elven statue that may be drawing something from him give Beholder's Eye V2 E30 a firm occult pull.
Messy monster hunts with table-side sparks.
Sci-fi actual play with a long memory.
Actual play with jokes, care, and table noise.
Scrappy D&D, sharp banter, real table chaos.
Chaotic dice, big fantasy fallout.
Waterdeep adventures with earned emotional fallout.
A Dungeon Master and players recap their previous session and continue a fantasy adventure involving political intrigue and a quest to the Emperor's Palace.
A Dungeon Master and players continue a fantasy role-playing game campaign, recapping previous events and engaging in combat with tortured souls.
A Dungeon Master introduces a fantasy world and recaps the previous episode's events involving a party of adventurers.
A Dungeon Master and players recap the previous episode and set up a moral dilemma involving a church ultimatum.
Rosie and Garen steal a church breastplate from a storage room in St.
Lin stays in the basilica as the Grand Abbot Melfast when Mother Abigail Tungsten arrives with a warning from Archbishop Delver.
Level 16 turns the party into a five-minute prison, teleport, and plane-shift machine.
Melfast fails a DC 18 Intelligence save and gets hit by Feeble Mind.
Lynn uses Detect Thoughts on a bishop in the Library of Archon, hears him worry about "our secret," and learns that several church leaders worship "the Great Mother." The same thread leads to a blunt exchange about rebirth, a reward, and the line "your society took my life from me." Back in the Grand Abbot's sub-basement, Mole and Cal find Piatra bound in a magic circle while energy drains into a stone slab.
Beholder's Eye V2 E29 opens with Alex running a DC 18 skill challenge in which Lin, APU, Rosie and Garin must flee four Basilica guards without a fight, with more guards arriving at the top of round three.
Part 10 of "What Happened at Tuck's Edge" opens with Alice reflecting on why townspeople kill each other over an invisible god, until Brother Francis shouts "Get in the cathedral!" as the mayor's guards throw fire bottles.
Dungeon master Alex runs the "For the Kids" session of Beholder's Eye, with the party split between a museum-library and the office of Archbishop Zay Show.