Jorogumo

I kind of shot my wa—er…spent my spinneret on the jorogumo on Monday.  But I’ll repeat: these seductresses fit in pretty much any campaign, either as themselves or with some slight cosmetic alterations.  Change their skin color and they work great as drow blessed by the Spider Queen; give them pointed ears and they can be unseelie fey or evil cousins of dryads; change their alignment to neutral or good (and do away with their grisly mating habits) and they can be priestesses of Anansi; etc., etc.

Of course, you can also have fun with jorogumo’s sexual proclivities (how nice to have an adventure where it’s the prince who needs rescuing, not the princess) or have her split the party (attempting to curse or murder the females and tengus while seducing the men).

A miller’s daughter kindly welcomes a party of sellswords to rest in the shade while she brings them drinks.  Unfortunately, the girl is really a jorogumo, the real miller and daughter are long dead, and the drinks are laced with potions of sleep.  In any case, the subterfuge does not last long anyway; when the party’s tengu guide returns from scouting ahead, the girl abandons all disguise and leaps to attack.  If overpowered, the jorogumo retreats to the spinning mill wheel, forcing the party to engage her atop the spinning structure if they wish to press the attack.

When an expected courier goes missing, scouts are sent fanning out through the valley to look for him.  Soon it is a race against time—first, to find the lad (now in the clutches of a jorogumo), and then to get him to a healer before his child hatches within his belly.

The drow of Embry are pacifists—a race of mystics and illusionists who dwell in the Crystalcairn Mountains.  Some whisper that the drow atone for some ancient crime, but the high elves will not speak of it and the grey only say, “Time forgives all.”  Then the drow start giving birth to a generation of aberrations and tieflings, their noblewomen spontaneously morph into jorogumos, and the moon above Embry bursts like a ruptured cocoon.  This signs are unmistakable: the drow Goddess of Spiders is awake.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 156

Hey, just a quick hello to all the new Tumblr readers out there—it’s been, like, 18 of you in the last week and a half!  Cheers, and I hope you keep enjoying.  If you want to really dig deep, this blog started here at Blogger with the aasimar.

As for my Blogger readers…well, there are typos in the last two days’ posts.  And they ain’t coming out for a while.  One of the reasons I switched to Tumblr was Blogger was incredibly hard to edit, especially if the original draft had come from Microsoft Word.  Weird formatting artifacts get in there and Will. Not. Come. Out.  (At least not without ruining every font size and line break in the process.)  For the past few months, things seemed to have improved…and then Tuesday it all went to heck again.  I had to redo all of Tuesday twice, and Wednesday I just threw up my hands.  So yeah, this blog is going to continue to be the neglected child for a while.

As for my regular readers in general, bear with me as we trundle through the Js and Ks.  I know a lot of you really dig the classic 1e and 2e AD&D monsters, but in this section of the alphabet we’re pretty heavily skewed toward Pathfinder Bestiary 2 and 3 beasties.  At least the kobolds are coming soon!

Finally, don’t forget you can always message me through the Ask About Monsters link on my Tumblr page or at Gmail (dailybestiary at you know the rest).  I read everything you send!