An Encounter: The Glass Spider

I tried – hard – but could not find an image that even came close to what I was seeing in my mind’s eye THAT WAS LEGAL FOR ME TO USE. The best I can do is the combined image above.
On the left is a lizard sculpture of rock crystal held by the Cinquantenaire Museum in Brussels, Belgium, that gives an idea of what the Glass Spider would look like. Photograph by Daderot, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons. I have changed the color profile of the image significantly, rotated it slightly, and extended the background to remove the resulting holes in the corners.
On the right is a spider sculpture that gives the basic shape that I was thinking of. Image by amteach from Pixabay, no information provided concerning the sculptor. I’ve rotated the image 90 degrees so that it is roughly the same size as the first.
The Glass Spider – metagame
It’s not often that you think of an encounter that would be equally at home in a D&D / Fantasy setting, a Swashbuckling Pirate game, a Sci-Fi environment, a Superhero game-space, or even – if you allow a little genetic engineering to escape the lab – a Cyberpunk game.
So when one came to mind last week (while writing Sensory Surprises in Encounters for CM), I knew that I had to toss a third log onto the Blog Carnival fire, hosted at Of Dice And Dragons.
This will be CM’s final contribution to this month’s carnival (unless inspiration strikes again, of course!)
Nest
While Glass spiders typically nest in existing cave systems, they can dig their own nests, which appear as large mounds, sixty feet or so wide at the base and twenty to thirty feet in height. (Less developed nests are smaller, of course).
Entrance
There is an entrance, made of webbing that has been coated in mud or earth to appear almost indistinguishable from the exterior of the nest. If it were smaller, and flat to the ground, this would not be dissimilar to that of a trap-door spider. But it’s neither small, (typically about 5′ high and almost as wide), oval-shaped, and flash to the side of the mound.
Some can detect the entrance because there will be a small amount of air emerging from the nest through the door (especially at it’s edges), and it will be a few degrees warmer than the surrounding sol / vegetation.
The door is almost fireproof, by virtue of the mud/earth incorporated into it, but a sufficiently sharp weapon can cut the webbing that ties it to the nest around the edges until it can be forced open. It typically weighs about the same as a typical human wooden door, and the webbing that holds it closed is about as strong as deadbolts, so it is also possible to batter it down.
Interior
Upon entering the nest, a violet glow can be perceived within, and the stench of rotting meat, and the sound of wet leather slowly sliding over wet leather. In the heart of the nest, at the far end relative to the entrance is a raised earthen dais bound together by golden threads.
These are actually Queen’s spiderweb, but this is not apparent at a distance; they look metallic.
Matriarch
Upon the dais is a glass spider, some 3-4 feet wide, with a forward body the size of a human torso and a huge abdomen at the rear which glows with a violet light, and appears to be filled with a smoky violet fluid.
It looks like a huge perfume bottle of cut crystal in the shape of a spider, and probably worth a fortune because of the exquisite workmanship, so well carved that it almost looks like it could move.
This is the Matriarch of the Nest, the Queen of the Glass Spiders, and she is – as you might expect – very much alive. But she does not move, so this is not apparent.
The Vapors
From her swollen abdomen, the Queen reacts to intruders by releasing glowing violet vapors that begin to snake and drift through the air. These have a strange coherence, they hold together, rather than dispersing into clouds.
The reasons for this coherence are not immediately apparent.
Male Swarm
Pheromones given off by these violet vapors do form an invisible cloud, however, and they drive the male worker spiders that reside upon the ceiling of the camber into a frenzy. These males, about a foot across, descend from above and attack the intruders in a swarm, even at the cost of their own lives.
GMs should take this altered mental state and determination into account when determining what the spiders need to roll in order to succeed in attacks. It’s my suggestion that each attack which has already taken place in a given combat round gives the next attacker a +1 attack bonus, but assess this according to the mechanics of the game system yourself.
They have two primary natural weapons – a poisonous sting and a poisonous bite. Of the two, the sting appears to be the more dangerous, but the bite is the real threat.
Numbing Bite
This is because the bite is numbing, making the wounded unaware of just how badly they have been hurt. To reflect this, the GM should track the damage without revealing the full amount to players; instead, after the first couple of bites, the GM should announce only 1/4 to 1/2 of the damage actually inflicted.
The bite also injects pheromones and hormones into the bloodstream of the victim, the significance of which will only become clear some hours later.
Poisonous Sting
The stings of glass spiders are soporific. Survivors describe the sensation of floating above the conflict as though reclining on a cloud, unconcerned for the harm being done to their physical bodies.
The first sting received in a round should subtract 1 from the attack skill of those harmed. This penalty should accumulate over time.
The effect will fade over the course of the subsequent hour or two, should the subject survive.
Corrosive Wounds
Bite wounds are frequently mis-characterized as corrosive, because the flesh around them seems to dissolve. This puzzles those who are able to analyze the anatomy of a deceased Glass Spider (male), because no corrosive substance can be find, and no organ for the production of such a substance has ever been identified.
This is because those looking are doing so in the wrong places.
Attack Of The Glass Spider
Those glowing violet tendrils of vapor released by the Matriarchal Queen of the Glass Spiders are actually very short tufts of web, and riding upon them are hundreds of minuscule Glass Spider young, less than a millimeter in size, about 1/32nd of an inch. These descend upon the wounds and consume the flesh in order to receive the hormones and pheromones in the blood of the victim, deposited in the bites of the males.
These spider-young require those hormones in order to mature. But, though there may be hundreds of them who attack each wound, there is only enough hormone to trigger the maturation process in a few; the others simply die off and drop away.
As a consequence, the wounds from Glass Spider bites do not bleed very profusely, adding to the impression that they are less serious than they might be..
Victory Over The Glass Spider
When the conflict has lasted long enough for one of the victims to fall, or for each target attacked to be both bitten and stung in multiple places, multiple times, the male spiders will appear to come to their senses, the pheromones that drove them wild wearing off.
They will immediately attempt to withdraw out of reach, permitting the victims of the attack to withdraw. Should they fail to take advantage of this opportunity, the Queen will issue a red mist that contains a different hormone; this renews the frenzy of the males indefinitely, who will attack until the intruders are dead.
The Queen herself will also rise from her dais and attack. Dead incubators will serve the Nest almost as well as living ones, so the nest offers their victims one chance – and one chance only – to escape, and (just possibly) to survive.
After The Attack
The first thing that will occur after an attack, assuming that the targets took the option to survive and escape, is that the tranquilizing effect of the spider stings will begin to wear off, followed shortly thereafter by the numbing effect of the spider bites.
The victims will come to feel the full impact of the damage they have suffered. But this will not begin until more than an hour later, and will take several hours longer to occur. This gives the victims ample time to move to a location some distance from the nest.
Healing potions, magics, and technologies will not prove very effective at repairing the damage at this point in time. It is almost as thought the bodies of the victims are resisting attempts to heal them.
Maturation
Some hours after the pain begins to make further movement difficult or impossible, survivors may notice small lumps moving about under their skin as the maturing spiders look for a wound or opening through which to escape the body of the host. At this point, they are only a millimeter or two in size, perhaps a sixteenth of an inch.
If wounds have been bound or healed, despite the difficulty described, the maturing spiders will need to consume the flesh of the host until they discover or create a way out. This can easily prove fatal, as the spiders have no way of knowing if they are consuming muscle, skin, or heart.
This causes them to grow, potentially reaching the size of a hen’s egg. At such sizes, the motion through the body is intensely painful to the victim, and permanent aftereffects can be expected even if they manage to survive.
Breakout
One way or another, the maturing spiders will find or create an escape route from the flesh of the host, a process known as “Breakout”. In general, breakout will occur 18-24 hours after the attack.
It is possible for surgical intervention to create escape paths for the maturing spiders. This consists of tracking the path of the moving ‘lumps’ and creating a sufficiently deep incision to present an exit point for the spiders.
It would have to be considered normal for such surgeons to attempt to capture or kill the maturing spiders, but at this age they are very fast-moving and quite capable of burrowing through earth or wood.
Once all the spiders have been removed / escaped, the character can be healed as normal.
Gender Ratio
The first spiders to enter a wound, and receive therefore more of the maturation hormones, become female and begin to become new Queens. The remainder are male and in thrall to the nascent Queen.
At this time, they are interested only in escape and pose no threat to the host or to others; they have not yet developed the glands that produce the various poisons and compounds that give bites and stings their effect.
It should be observed that victims of a Glass Spider attack have sufficient time and incentive to move some distance from the nest in which they were attacked, but become immobilized before they can move too far away, such that the environment would become inhospitable to their kind.
New Nests
Under the direction of the new Queen, the workers will dig for access to an existing cavern (one unoccupied by Glass Spiders), and should that fail, the maturation process will eventually drive them to excavate their own, thus creating a new nest per host. This is how the species propagates and spreads.
In the days before sentient beings dared enter their nests, driven by fear, malice, or greed, animals served the purposes of the Glass Spiders, hunted and trapped by expeditions of Males and brought back to the nest to become hosts.
Even today, when the Queen is not yet fully mature, or not driven by her instincts to found a new nest, Spider hunting parties will seek animals to serve as food for the nest.
It’s ironic that such hunts will often trigger an incursion by sentient beings living in the vicinity. The Spiders are a natural phenomenon, and pose little danger to those who take adequate precautions; but to the ignorant and overconfident, they can be deadly dangerous.
Usage
Virtually everything that you have just read came to me in a single flash of inspiration. I can see parts of it that clearly draw upon particular sources for inspiration – Alien, for example – but there are others that are more obscure, and the totality is quite distinct.
In a fantasy campaign, Glass Spider nests can appear on a border as the nests spread, and (of course) a room or corridor in a dungeon would make a perfectly acceptable site for a nest.
In a Sci-fi campaign, it is more likely that they will be found on an alien planet to which they are indigenous. They may well dominate an entire planet, or just a geographic / climatic zone upon such a planet. Personally, I feel they are more interesting when the nests are seeking to spread, so I probably wouldn’t have them dominate the entire planet.
They would tend to dislike cities, but might well find a home in parks and other green areas, and could easily spread up and down a river.
In Cyberpunk and Superhero settings, it might be necessary to establish in the background that scientists are exploring the genetic engineering of life-forms to create self-sustaining ‘bio-factories’ for the production of various medical substances (including, perhaps, vaccines). It thus makes perfect sense for such creations to escape and become part of the landscape – and I am suddenly reminded of Jurassic Park (the novel more than the movie) and the built-in genetic vulnerability that was supposed to keep them from spreading, and of the various comments (in the movie) by Ian Malcolm (Jeff Goldblum) about Chaos…
More Ideas
A couple of further thoughts to throw out there for consideration. The above implies that there are no serious consequences for humans as a result of exposure to the various hormones and pheromones of the Glass Spiders; that does not have to be the case.
Furthermore, perhaps the Glass Spiders inherit some aspects of the genetic code of the host – potential Xenomorphs (just like Alien.). This might include intelligence if this is the first time they have used a sentient species as hosts. This potentially makes the ‘Next Generation” of Glass Spiders far more dangerous.
Third, that leads me to a thought from Aliens regarding the use of Glass Spiders in Sci-fi – like the Xenomorphs in this film, it might be that an “enterprising” corporation saw the potential to exploit the Spiders – in this case, for pharmaceutical research / production – and deliberately send the PCs to investigate them.
Finally – the Glass Spiders are deadly encounters in direct proportion to how much is already known, in-game, about them. While becoming a host would be traumatic, the potential for surgical release means that it need not be fatal – if you know what you’re doing, and why. But if you don’t know what’s happening, it’s easy to make all the wrong moves. And those include the most typical PC behavior…
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