Sunday, November 20, 2011

fantasy spider people

Instead of drawing a bunch of spiders in weird poses by memory, I downloaded a bunch of spider pictures and looked at them today! Thinking of spiders a lot.

The spider people are always in disguise amongst humanoids. They walk uprightish, with two pairs of legs holding them stable and two or three pairs for holding stuff. They wear humanoids' clothing for this too. I figure, if real spiders can cover themselves in ant corpses to hunt ants, spider people can wear clothes to trade with humanoids.

They do trade with humanoids. The bones and shells of what they have hunted and, um, excretions like poison/acid and web, and uhh, textiles made of them... for lots of tasty blood and broth. They keep big pack animals and bleed them without killing them.

Why are spiders even sentient? Spiders are opportunistic or patient hunters, some eat their mates, they lay 100s of eggs a few species guard them until the hatchlings disperse. Given enough food they will eat until their digestion track explodes, and they don't anesthetize their food, just paralyze it.

Fantasy giant spiders were vulnerable to summoning and binding magic, and in their tame form had a lot of advantages, being able to work together. The spider civilization is an extension of that. Hatchling spiders are still pests, they have to be indoctrinated. Only those most vulnerable to magic end up becoming civilized.

That vulnerability could go some of the way towards balancing out the acid/poison and the webbing attacks and maybe climbing or walking on water.

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