Red Widow

Also called the spider queen, the red widow is an evil shapechanger with two bodies. Usually it walks among people as a breathtaking woman with long, flowing red hair, dressed to suit local fashion but always in a way that invites attention. In that form it counts as a 0-level human; its listed statistics apply to its true shape.

That true shape is a giant spider, taken only when it is ready to kill. It resembles a huge black widow with the colors swapped: a brilliant crimson body marked with a black hourglass on the back. The red widow has no language of its own but always speaks fluently the tongues of whatever cultures it lives among.

Open fighting is not its style. The widow lures a victim close, pulls him into a passionate embrace and only then transforms, a process that takes a full round. Anyone who sees the change, usually just the doomed lover, must make a horror check at once. The widow never loosens its hold while changing; breaking free calls for a bend bars roll, which may be tried again each round.

In spider form the bite does just 1d3 damage but carries a lethal poison (Class E, Immediate, Death/20). Against someone in its grip the bite hits automatically; against anyone who has escaped, it must roll to hit. It can also spray webbing exactly as the web spell, climb sheer walls as with spider climb, and call 10d10 spiders to its aid: 65% normal, 20% large, 10% huge and 5% giant. These spiders adore it, defend it to the death and never check morale.

Red widows usually live in human towns and cities, moving about openly in human guise and courting their prey under cover of night. Seducing and killing a new lover every week is not unusual.

The widow drains blood and other fluids from its kills. One body, hidden somewhere in the lair, feeds it for up to a week; afterward it dumps the shriveled, half-rotted remains far from home so the lair stays secret.

To breed, it mates with an ordinary human man, kills him and lays the fertilized eggs inside his body. They hatch within a week and feed on the corpse's fluids. A brood numbers 2-8 young, which stay spiders (treat as large spiders) for a year before gaining human form and adulthood; few remain with their mother after that. Barring violence or accident, a red widow lives 20 to 30 years.