Chitine

Chitines are diminutive four-armed humanoids whose many joints bend in ways no human limb could. Their faces look human apart from faceted insect eyes and mandibles jutting from the mouth, and stringy black hair tumbles down their backs like a horse's mane. Their gray, mottled skin secretes an oil that keeps spider silk from sticking to them, and tiny hooks covering their palms and soles let them climb any rough surface at full speed.

They dress in dried, treated silk woven with bits of colored stone and carved bone, carry tools in pouches built into their garments, and always leave hands and feet bare. They speak the drow tongue and sometimes a smattering of other underground languages.

Chitines love ambushes and traps and are both clever and cruel in designing them. A favorite ploy is an ordinary-looking web with an apparently natural path around it; the web is a decoy, and taking the detour springs a hidden pit, falling net or some similar snare. They can glue grit and rock chips onto web mats to fake convincing stone walls or floors, and through a secret process they harden silk into a slightly flexible, non-sticky, bonelike material that is sharp enough to cut or pierce armor. Spikes and blades of it woven into traps deal 1d6 damage each.

Warriors usually carry javelins and short swords, holding weapons in three hands and a hardened web shield in the fourth, and wear the silk equivalent of studded leather. Hardened-web gear works like normal equipment but decays within months unless treated with the chitines' skin oil. Fire is its weakness: held in a flame for two rounds, it catches and is consumed over 2d4 rounds. Body armor of this material can be no better than AC 4. Sunlight bothers chitines, imposing -1 to THAC0 and damage.

Chitines live only underground, in cavern villages hidden at the heart of trapped web mazes. Their homes are domed houses of hardened silk, complete with windows and ornamental shapes, built on floor, wall or ceiling alike, and linked by web bridges. A heart-shaped temple to the spider goddess usually hangs in the middle of the cavern.

The race began as discarded drow experiments. Over the centuries it has multiplied, and it now schemes to topple the drow who are the goddess's favorites, while serving her with total devotion. Rumor says chitine priestesses belong to a different, more powerful race, closer to the goddess herself.

A chitine spins sticky silk from an opening in its belly at one foot per round. It eats anything that moves, sucking its victims dry and dropping the husks on the cave floor beneath the temple. Drow and driders both hunt chitines.