Skitter Out From the Darkness - New Ways to Bring Arachnophobia

It's been a while since we had monster stats here on the Apotheosis Studios blog. The dragons and elementals took a brief wander through the dungeons of the reader's imaginations. It's time to get back to monster making.

One of my favourite things to do for my games; I see the hundreds of pages of monsters as suggestions rather than gospel things in any established world. Tinkering, and more often, building things from the ground up from grand sources of inspiration, is much more my jam. It doesn’t always mean changing or building a new stat block in its entirety. Mapping a new idea onto something we already have can breathe new life into the pile of numbers most players tussle with. In a world of the fantastical and magical, I think bringing the relatively normal up to those proportions is the way to go.

Follow the Spiders?

The rare and treasured sentry spider has confounded crypto arachnologists for centuries. Unlike every other giant spider species, this one is highly social. If a female of the species raised from near hatching, the spider can stay incredibly loyal to a trainer or carer for the majority of its life.

The Sentry spider, watching the threshold of a stately manor - Arachnoid Sentry by SIXMOREVODKA

The nesting instincts the large and very territorial females display is what gives the species their name. If left in a home it deems safe by its master, the sentry will guard the openings and doorways with an intricate web network and acidic venom.

Giant spiders have very different biology to the small ones we dust away from our homes. A spider the size of a horse has the lungs and organ structure more similar to us than a smaller spider that breathe through spiracles and air sacs.

This leaves certain long leg species moving so slowly in their forest home that plants and mushrooms grow across their immense forms. If a bed of toadstools starts to move, you can probably outrun the sporecap spider, but their immense webs leave many hopelessly immobile.

The haze of pollen may spell a forester’s doom - Sporecap Spider by Lars Grant-West

Web of Ideas

Monstrous versions of normal creatures make for great wandering monsters and things to buff up the levels of relatively fresher characters. They're honestly incredibly crucial to help characters get started. Catching the wonder in a player's eyes is one of the greatest rewards, and the terror of them waking up upside-down in a tree is very real. Mechanically speaking, these spiders can easily fit to the Giant Spider statistics.

Now we want to hear from you. How else do you imagine fantastical spiders? What other mundane beasts of our world need the level up? Let us know in our discord server or in the comments below.

Adam Ray contributes much for adventurers here on Apotheosis Studios. As co-founder of Fantastic Universes, he writes about card gaming and PC gaming to a corner of the internet he carved out himself. On Youtube, he can be found game mastering for No Ordinary Heroes, or editing the antics on The Hostile Atmosphere. Follow his Twitter @IzzetTinkerer.