{TSR sold Dungeons and Dragons to Wizards of the Coast} Not exactly. After a few years of bad management decisions and the periodical decline of the gaming industry (it seems to run on a three to five year cycle - one year there is a hot new game out, it's still big a year later, it fades over the next two, then something new and big comes out), they were facing bankruptcy. Two companies stepped forward and offered to buy them out of debt in order to take over their operations - Wizards of the Coast and Hasbro. About 18 months later, WotC faced the exact same financial problems TSR had (they'd paid TSR's debts, then had nothing left to pay their own!), and Hasbro again stepped forward, adding yet another company to their massive empire. {Almost all of the monsters in the original Monster Manual by Gary Gygax were "ideas" borrowed from other sources. In some cases he faced copyright problems, such as with the estate of Lovecraft, and so you do not see the Lovecraftian Mythos monsters in the 2nd edition onward. } The Beholder was originally a pun (based on the "Beauty is in the eye of the Beholder" saying), and one of the VERY few original creatures in the D&D cannon. Most of the creatures E. Gary Gygax made use of were either from "common" mythology (Catoblepas, dragon, the undead, etc.) - and thus assumed in public domain - or were "borrowed" from popular fiction (the AD&D troll came from "Three Hearts and Three Lions" by Poul Anderson, and the Mind Flayer is - by his own admission - borrowed from the horrors of H.P. Lovecraft). There are a few cases where Gygax took a name from mythology and created his own creature for it as well (the named Demons and Devils - i.e., Dispater, Orcus, Juiblex, Demogorgon, et al all exist in mythology but not in the forms he presented).