The Spider

When humans first reached the continent, a goblin tribe held the woods where a human realm now stands. Mightiest of these sorcerous goblins was Vrask-Gul, called the Spiderlord because foes caught in his traps never escaped. His goblin and gnoll armies, thousands strong, toppled elven towers and filled elven warriors with poisoned arrows. He claimed much of the dark forest as the Webwood, and when human settlers drove the elves from a neighboring old forest, he fell upon the fugitives so that only a handful reached their homeland.

His goblins clashed with those settlers until the great battle on the mountain, where the gods' death-blast all but erased his host. He crept home with a few survivors, but he had absorbed some of the dark god's essence. He used that power to rebuild his rule, drawing young goblins to him, but every use drew his spiderish nature further out. Not even surgery could stop the extra legs sprouting from his hips or the swollen abdomen replacing his lower body. Only giving up his blood powers would halt the change, and if he did, ambitious young goblins would overthrow him. So the Spiderlord became the Spider.

The old emperors could not kill it, but as heartlanders cleared the land and drove goblins back into savagery, they hemmed it in. It brooded in its wood, sending raiders out to die as its sanity drained away with its goblin nature.

Now it is a huge, mottled, hairy spider topped by a muscular goblin torso, with pointed ears, a mouth full of fangs and eyes empty of reason. It will talk and bargain, but its moods lurch wildly and it may kill a guest on a whim. Still, it always keeps its word, a twisted honor that may be all that is left of a proud goblin king.

The Gorgon and Caerith Manslayer are mightier, but the Spider remains a dreadful foe. It scuttles from side to side to dodge blows, swipes with two powerful clawed hands and follows with a razor-toothed bite. A bitten foe must save vs. poison at -2 or die on the spot, and even a successful save costs 20 hit points.

With a successful attack roll it can spring 30 feet high and come down on a target up to 50 feet off. It saves this mostly for ambush or escape.

It can trail a silk line behind it or weave a full web filling a 40-foot cube that holds victims like the web spell. The web cannot be burned away but dissolves on its own after a day or two.

Cornered, it spits a huge gob of blinding saliva that can strike up to three people clustered within 10 feet, with a separate attack roll for each. Victims are blinded for 1d6 turns and, unless they save vs. poison, take 1d6 damage a round later. Rinsing with water prevents that damage but not the blindness.

It regenerates 1 hit point a round and can recover even past -10 hit points. The only sure way to finish it is to hack the remains apart, burn them and salt the ground where the ashes fall.

The Spider rules the Webwood, a dank forest wedged among the realms of the heartland; surviving so long amid so many enemies proves its cunning. The wood is riddled with pits and natural snares, where what seem to be game trails end in bogs or cairns of goblin dead. Living goblins and gnolls swarm there at its command. No one has tried to usurp it in centuries; the last fool's fate is still a campfire tale.

Spiders beyond counting fill the forest, from fingernail-sized to deer-killers, most of them highly venomous, and none of them harms the Spider's servants.

Its armies raid far and wide without warning or provocation. Rulers who marched great hosts into the Webwood to tame it have always come out with fewer than half their troops and a vow never to return. The Spider also holds some strange sway over ordinary spiders. One unlucky witness claimed to see small spiders pumping their venom into it, and others say it shares a telepathic bond with every one of its eight-legged subjects.