Living Web

Living webs, also called carnivorous webs or duleep, wander caves and abandoned ruins in search of food. They look like heavy gray drapes, strands and wisps of dusty cobweb, with no visible senses or organs; up close they seem to be colonies of tiny identical cells.

Touching a living web delivers an electric shock: 1d4 damage for the smallest, 1d6 for a web of 3-5 HD, and 2d4 at 6 HD. Twice per turn it can also hurl a small lightning bolt, 20 yards range, for 3d4 damage, though a web with fewer than 9 hit points manages only one per turn. Every fragment keeps this power, so a web cut in two can throw four bolts per turn. Electricity of any kind, natural or magical, is absorbed and permanently adds 1 Hit Die per 8 points taken in, visibly swelling the web.

Fire, water, heat and cold leave it untouched. Edged weapons do full damage but cut it into two smaller wisps, each with half the remaining hit points and both still advancing; blunt weapons do half damage, since the web stretches rather than tears. It splits only from attacks or accidents, never by choice. Acting purely on instinct, it ignores fear, repulsion and similar spells.

These nomads drift endlessly through underground and wild places, especially caves and ruins full of ordinary webs to hide among, seeking plants, carrion and live prey. What they eat becomes the electrical energy that drives them. Despite having no visible senses, they detect vibration, temperature changes and other living webs up to 90 feet away.

They flow over surfaces on millions of tiny filaments like creeping caterpillars, fusing filaments into denser masses as needed, and they scale any wall or ceiling, whatever it is made of, without ever slipping. Nothing physical or magical can pull one loose short of killing it. A web that senses another with fewer than 9 hit points tries to merge with it, absorbing the smaller one's Hit Dice and hit points, to a combined maximum of 6 Hit Dice.

They are handy vermin killers and can be captured to guard unused parts of caverns and settlements.

Memory webs are masses of fiber much like the strands of a web spell, though not identical. One hides by balling up tightly, then pounces up to 180 feet, opening into a 20-foot circle that needs no anchors. Escaping it works like breaking out of a normal web. As it tightens, everyone wrapped inside takes 1d6 per round until freed, dead, or the web is destroyed. Nonmagical weapons and fire do only half damage to it.

It soaks up the memories of those it kills, and when destroyed it releases everything gathered in the past day as a telepathic shock wave that plants dreamlike, patchy recollections in every mind within 200 feet.