The Blessing of the Queen of Spiders

Thanks to a delightfully chaotic session of Knave in which two characters died, one using her dying action to kill the other (long story), I now have a fun new character archetype!

Somehow you’ve attracted the attention of the Queen of Spiders, Lolth, and she has decided to bestow a blessing, or possibly a curse, upon you. It will certainly feel like a curse at first. Your veins fill with venom and your body dies quickly and painfully, but your soul doesn’t move on. Instead, a large spider with a bloated abdomen crawls from your corpse and scuttles away to find a dark, quiet corner to spin itself a large cocoon.

If undisturbed (and most creatures instinctively avoid it), the ball of web twitches and shudders for a few days, until finally it hatches. Something that looks a lot like you emerges. It is you, in a manner of speaking.

Your soul is now trapped in a cage of webbing in roughly the same shape of your old body. Your features are beautiful, perfectly symmetrical and deeply uncanny. Your skin is pale, and it’s hard to say where it ends and your clothing begins. You’re clothed in whatever style your old body was wearing, but all your clothes are pristine white. If you stand in front a bright light, you’re dimly translucent, and vague dark shapes can be seen scuttling tirelessly about inside you.

While you maintain enough strength to perform basic tasks, you automatically fail any strength check against everything except gravity (you’re now extremely light). While the webbing is quite tough, you’re completely hollow and can bend or twist in ways that would kill a human without injury. Fire will kill you immediately, as will being completely crushed or something creating a large enough hole for your soul to escape. Once loose, your soul may return to whatever afterlife you should have gone to, or you may be trapped on the material plane forever. Best not to test it.

You have eight spiders inside you, constantly scurrying about, repairing any tears and strengthening the web as it wears against the world. You love them dearly. You no longer have hit points, but every time you take damage that doesn’t instantly kill you, roll a d8. On a 1 or 2, the attack hit and killed one of the spiders inside you, but otherwise you’re fine. Someone can stick a sword straight through your head or where your heart should be and only cause you mild inconvenience, leaving a ragged hole that your spiders immediately scuttle towards and begin repairing.

You will get used to this in time. Others generally won’t.

If all your spiders are killed, you continue to function but can no longer repair damage. Every scrape, every nick, every burr and loose nail or sharp stone becomes another step towards your slow but inevitable demise. Fortunately, like all creatures, the spiders that live inside you can slowly replenish their number, although eight seems to be the limit. You don’t need to eat, but they do, and you find yourself only interested in meat now. You have an unsettling compulsion to consume small creatures whole and wriggling. Eventually you realise that you don’t need to use your mouth to eat, but can press small treats against your body for your beloved companions to enshroud and draw into your insides for later consumption.

If you ask nicely, perhaps they’ll let you store small items inside yourself. You may find that you don’t have to actually use your dagger in a fight if you shove your hand down your distended throat to pull it out.

The spiders don’t speak, but they do communicate. When annoyed, they chitter and hiss angrily, running up and down inside you in a frenzy. If you really annoy them, you may find them starting to unpick the webbing that contains your essence, but since this is death for them too, they’re reluctant to do it. Besides, they love you too. If you keep them happy, and they are simple creatures with simple desires, they will purr and chirp softly during quiet moments, tapping their legs gently against the inside of your webbing like a caress.

Perhaps, if you listen very carefully and learn the intricate patterns of their chirps and taps, perhaps they might be whispering secrets to you. Or perhaps delicate little lies. Who can say?

It occurred to me after writing this that it was definitely partially inspired by the breath-takingly wonderful blog post “Alignment, Part One: Spiders” at The Lovely Dark (https://thelovelydark.blogspot.com/2021/10/alignment-part-one-spiders.html). Go read that too. It’s magnificently weird and I adore it.