Drow Lich

There are three kinds: wizard, priestess and drider. The first two look like typical liches, tall and bony, their black skin pulled taut and mottled gray with rot. Wizards favor loose crimson robes full of pockets for spell components, while priestesses wear vestments bearing the sign of the spider goddess.

Drider liches are rarer and far stranger. Drow who displease their goddess may be killed or reshaped by her priestesses into driders, a drow torso, nearly always male, atop a giant spider's body. Most are flung into battle and die young, but a handful escape to study, some seeking revenge, and a few of those reach lichdom as a shriveled, mummified torso on a rotting skeletal spider frame.

All drow liches keep the languages they knew in life and can talk freely with any arachnid.

Every variety has the usual lich aura: a viewer under 5 Hit Dice or levels flees for 5d4 rounds unless it saves vs. spell. The freezing touch deals 1d10, and a failed save vs. paralysis leaves the victim unable to act until dispel magic or similar magic is used. Only +1 or better weapons, spells or monsters above 4 Hit Dice (4+1 minimum) can strike one, and spells of death, insanity, electricity, cold, polymorph, enfeeblement, sleep or charm fail against it. Priests of 8th level and paladins of 10th level or above may attempt turning.

They cast as in life, keep the drow knack for once-daily darkness, faerie fire, levitate, dancing lights, know alignment and detect magic, and have magic resistance of 50% plus 2% per Hit Die.

Wizard liches are volatile, coldly logical in thought but ruled by violent tempers. They hoard magic: each carries a strong offensive item such as a wand of fireballs or staff of power and a defensive one such as bracers of defense, and often enchants its clothes, perhaps to grant invisibility three times a day, combining these with rings and other gear for devastating barrages. Their lairs crawl with hairy spiders that swarm anything that enters, the harmless lich included.

Priestess liches are always female, granted lichdom as a reward for devotion, a gift both coveted and double-edged. They keep staves, weapons and protective devices but draw their main strength from commanding undead as evil priests do and from the goddess's power over spiders. Three times a day one can turn twenty normal spiders into twenty large ones, ten into one huge spider, or twenty into a single gargantuan spider, the change lasting one hour per Hit Die, usually 11 or more.

Drider liches, whether wizards or priests, get none of those extras; failed priests oddly keep their spells, perhaps because the goddess enjoys the misery her outcasts cause. Instead they control undead of up to half their Hit Dice, but only insect-like skeletons, usually the husks of giant spiders and similar local creatures, not humanoid undead (spells and items can still command those). Three times daily they spin a sticky web from the thorax that works exactly like the 2nd-level wizard spell web, and they speak with and command all spiders within as many yards as their Hit Dice.

Few drow live in the misty dread realm, yet a surprising share of them have found the secret of lichdom, perhaps helped by their dark nature and by the realm's dark powers, which seem to welcome them, and drawn there by the tragedy of the driders in particular. Wizard and priestess liches settle near towns and cities, where victims for their experiments are plentiful, and mingle with the locals more than once-human liches, delighting in fooling them. Driders keep to themselves, harder to disguise and bitter toward the world, in underground lairs carpeted with thousands of hungry spiders.

They are made exactly as human liches are, phylactery included. Their unnatural presence makes animals within 100 yards edgy and nervous.

Wizard and priestess liches can become demiliches normally, gaining those powers while keeping their own. No drider lich is known to have done so, whether because none has been found and survived, or because their goddess likes letting them chase what they can never reach.