Ok so imagine your fantasy setting with your typical giant spiders.
Ok, now imagine that these spiders have largely been domesticated for their incredibly valuable silk. They help make clothes, rope, textiles, even ARMOR. They’re almost treated like carnivorous cows in the regions that can support them. They might even name these girls the classic names like “Bessie”. They’re great mothers and produce many young; useful for trade and… even food if you like The Crunch.
People in this world are hardly afraid of big spiders the same as we’re hardly afraid of big dogs. Wary of wild ones, but not scream and cry terrified. Smaller spiders…it depends. Would you be scared if you suddenly saw a tiny cow crawling on your wall? The only type of spider people collectively fear are the hunting types: the ones that don’t spin webs, and instead attack their prey with brute force and a much stronger venom.
These large domestic spiders are incredibly lazy. They’ll sit in their webs and wait for their handlers to put their food on the web. Unless you get tangled, they don’t see you as food. This makes them great guards as well. They build traps for you. The venom isn’t deadly to humans…but can still be used as a weapon or in medicine. They’re just so damn useful that millennia ago, people put aside their instinctual fear just to get those sweet benefits.
Thank you for attending my TedTalk.
Drow
See I thought of drow
But I think it’d be more interesting to see a group not labelled as “super duper evil” using giant spiders. Spiders aren’t evil by default, and if a fantasy culture used them enough, they’d get over their fear of arachnids, and they wouldn’t be seen as a dark, dreaded thing.
Ideally I wanna see dwarves making spider armor and elves spinning spider silk, while their forest home is protected by elegant webs.
Well in a more believable fantasy setting, a drow farmer probably wouldn’t be any more “evil” than a human farmer. It’s the military aristocracy and the church that import huge amounts of slaves, levy peasants into wars, and assassinate each other biweekly.
Tag: drow
New fantasy race
A race of spider people whose huge monstrous females compete with dragons as their ecological niche.
The males, tend to take on the roles of adventurers.
Some males do look like human females, and some of the female spiders can gain the ability to shapeshift if they devour enough magical creatures as they grow up.
And yes, like dragons, they can breed with anything with enough magic to bridge the gap.
Dragons vs spiders is a conflict in fantasy I haven’t seen done before, but was inspired by @bogleech noting how giant spider played the same role as european dragons in their respective myths (aside from the ones that transformed into women.)
Giant Centipedes are a known ‘enemy’ of dragons in Chinese lore, so that’s not entirely out of nowhere…
A possible way to reflavor and use Lolth in your campaign/world if Drow aren’t typically evil in your setting
Keep the that edgy teenage goddess away from my spider babies
On a more serious note, I love the idea someone came up with of more “friendly” (as in, as friendly as any elves) dark elves living in dark hillside thickets.
My own contribution would be the idea of them having gray skin, while underdark Drow are more pale with dark tatoos, and depictions get mixed up between them and the dark elves.
A radical take, but I think its a good one in order to get away from the nasty implications of the “skin turned dark by curse”
I’m in a Discord server for the Eberron campaign setting for D&D, and last night, we were talking about drow. One of Eberron’s drow cultures is associated with scorpions instead of spiders, and in an effort to turn the discussion away from complaining about how bad FR drow are written, I brought up the fact that scorpions carry their babies on their backs, and put forth the idea that the scorpion tribe drow strapped their babies’ cradles to the back of giant scorpions.
@naturalistsguidetoeberron then turned it into the beautiful, beautiful idea of a drow trying to sell foreigners “child safety devices” and not getting why foreigners leave their babies without the protection of a giant scorpion.
I have no idea why my mind automatically went to “Eastern-European accent” when I read that Drow’s dialogue in my head…
Ideas for rebel drow
(and not just good aligned. Neutral fine too. Evil too , actually)
Raised by myconids
Raider who abandoned their kind for a sea-elf and became a sailor.
Merchant who goes adventuring for wares. Just really finds the surface world less stressful even with that stupid sun.
Vigilante.
Monsters and Stuff 