Drider

Spells.  Poison.  Sexual dimorphism.  The drider is far too interesting an antagonist to leave languishing in only drow-related adventures.  If you want to get the most bang out of your driders, set them free to roam your campaign. (And besides, drow in most Pathfinder campaigns don’t worship a spider queen, so the drow/spider connection is tenuous at best.  In fact—while this blog tries to stay away from treading on the Golarion setting’s toes—one could just as easily imagine Calistria having elf/wasp servitors with drider stats.)  Wherever elves go wrong, there’s room for a drider’s web.

The “hag of the Broken Bayou” is in truth no hag at all.  She is actually a corpulent drider who rules over a krewe of boggards and swamp-dwelling fetchlings.

Bards flock from far away to hear the driders of Spidersong Cathedral perform their haunting songs.  The Holy Sisters of the Web are naturally superlative string players, sometimes turning whole rooms into instruments with their webs.  But the real draw is hearing them play the Archicembalo, a kind of super-harpsichord one needs a spider’s spindly legs as well as ten fingers to play well.  The price for hearing the Sister Supreme perform is a sentient being, still alive and wrapped securely in spider silk, for her consumption as she plays.

Those who think drow cities are monstrosities have never beheld the drider stronghold of Latrodes.  There the tables—in this case, the operating tables—are turned, with drider alchemists performing horrible fleshwarping experiments on the drow and any other humanoids they can get their hands on.  The average Latroden is a drow-turned-mongrelman so surgically altered he borders on being a construct.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 113

Hey look, last week’s The New Yorker taught me a new word!  Guess which one.

I seem to recall driders originally being bloated, cursed creatures, but they seem to have gotten smarter and much more alluring by 3.5 and Pathfinder.  Call it Harpy Syndrome: Any race that features female antagonists while eventually be portrayed as sexy.  (Except hags.)  (So far.)