For this adventure, I wanted to get the player's into the Forest and help them learn to hate it. I also wanted something more free form and active and complex than the first tutorial adventure, where the players would have more control over how they tackle the challenges. Strictly speaking this mission into the Forest is optional, but what group of adventurers would turn down the chance to risk their lives for money? Oh right an additional inspo was the mythic idea of chasing a holy stag into a forest, but turned on its head as this stag is just leading them into the horns of danger.
The PCs go into the Forest, are lured ever deeper, and then try to win their way out once they realize their danger.
The Empire is launching a Spring drive to clear out a section of the Forest so that new villages can be put down. This is a major deforestation effort, involving thousands of lumberjacks, guards, porters, wagon teams, etc. etc. They will go in and over the course of several days they will cut down and burn every tree they can find, and then build fortified villages on the cleared land. The PCs aren't part of that effort. Rather, they have been offered a moonlighting job to go into a nearby part of the Forest, make some noise, and then retreat back out of the Forest. They would be one of several dozen teams doing the same thing, the idea being that these pinprick efforts might distract the Forest from responding to the main effort. The PCs are being paid by one the major merchant houses, who are in turn being paid by the Empire for this service.
So, the plot. They will go into the forest, catch the attention of a Witch, and be tormented and hunted by the Witch and its children (though they will not realize this is happening at first). Almost by default they will have accomplished their mission of distracting the Forest. But at what cost? The Witch, a spider archetype, will use its spider-children to spy on the PCs, while using illusions to draw them further into the forest and prolong their mission. Ideally one or more PCs will be drawn off to their doom. There's a decent chance that the PCs never even see the Witch in this mission, just the monsters that it controls.
On the plus side! A great chance to engage with PCs backstory, as the Witch shapes illusions to entrap them.
Hired by Torbruk to take part in this decoy effort. Large amount of money offered on completion of the mission. Due to the roughness of the ground in the Forest, cannot make use of carts and will need to make use of mules and manpower to carry their supplies. Should be a 3 day trip into the Forest.
Torbruk: member of the merchant cartel, assigned to keep an eye on the mission. Large man, about 30, suspicious and used to giving orders, but not completely unfair. Wants to see the mission done well, can be used as an excuse to try and keep the PCs in the Forest for longer.
Six guards/porters: assigned to help Torbruk, and to carry food, water, and oil in their heavy backpacks. Narratively they are there to be red-shirts and suffer/die in horrific ways, and give PCs a bit of a heads up as to what is threatening them, and a bit of a narrative shield before really bad stuff starts happening to the PCs. The porters are all healthy and competent, but will be of minimal use when fighting against most Monsters in the Forest.
On first entering the forest, within a half mile or so they start to notice tiny spiders. The spiders are about 0.75 cm across, and are pure black except for a daub of pink color along their abdomen. Looks like someone touched them with a paintbrush, or like a small pink petal is on their back. These spiders are everywhere. They mostly hide themselves, but if the PCs do a thorough examination they will find several of these spiders on every tree and bush that they pass. Soon they will start finding them on their pack animals, inside their packs, etc. The spiders are like sand on the beach, give them a few hours and they will migrate into absolutely everything. The spiders are not hostile and have no attack, and will try to run and hide if they feel particularly threatened. They do not create (physical) webs.
These pink-petal spiders are the simplest of Selath's children, and act as her sensor/observation net in her domain. They also serve as conduits for her psychic power, laying down a light web of psychic influence that she can see and act through. If PCs have any telepathic powers they can actually talk to the pink-rose spiders. The spiders have an extremely basic intelligence, are linked by faint threads of psychic power to other nearby petal-spiders, and their main drive is curiosity and the desire to see/explore strangers. If the PCs are really intuitive/psychically powerful/lucky, they might realize that the network of psychic power has another presence on it, something shadowy and far more powerful and sinister than the petal-spiders.
Psychic infiltration starts. Selath uses her powers to start lightly riffling through thoughts and memories of the interlopers. As the PCs travel through the unchanging environment of the Forest, they start thinking back to large events in their lives. Ask a few of the PCs about past highpoints and lowpoints of their life, the things that they dwell upon during this long trip into the Forest. You will use this info later when setting up traps.
At night, a horde of Antler-Spiders attacks the PCs camp. Some spiders will try to distract/attack the PCs, while others will try to drag some of the porters off into the Forest to be devoured.
At night, rose-spiders will crawl through the camp, in order to act as a better psychic conduit so that Selath can read their thoughts/dreams. Wake up to them in clothes, sleeping bags, packs
First trap is set. In my campaign, one of the PCs had lost a loved one (Dexter) in the Forest, and wanted to resolve what had happened to them. So Selath's first trap is that they come across Dexter, badly wounded and laying against a tree, gored and dying, with shards of chitin growing and pulsing in his entrails. This is a web-illusion of Selath's, intended to get them to go further into the Forest. Dexter manages to gasp out a few words: "the stag! the stag! you must ... you must ... it has the key ..." before they try to heal him, which causes the chitin shards to steal the healing, explosively gestate, and release their spider swarms. This instantly kills the web-Dexter. Strictly speaking, Selath does not have any reason to give the PCs warning about her monster's ability to steal healing, but it did seem like info the PCs needed in order to be fair.
On searching the immediate area, the PCs find the stag's bloody footprints in area. The footprints head East, deeper into the Forest.
This was the lure that I setup for my PCs, you'd need to adjust it to fit the backstory/psychology of your own PCs. Basically you want to give them a reason to chase this stag further into the Forest.
the Stag leads the PCs on a chase into the Forest. The stag's blood hoof prints leave an easy trail to follow. After a day or so, the PCs see the Stag posing majestically on a far away hill side, enticing them to chase further. Eventually the PCs close to the point where it becomes a chase, with the Stag finally brought to bay. Ideally you want the PCs to travel 3 or more days into the Forest. There shouldn't be many other challenges, since the Forest/Selath wants them to go deeper into peril. If the PCs seem like they might give up and head back to the border, have the Stag make a closer appearance, enticing them to chase it further.
The nights are scary, but not immediately threatening. The pink-petal spiders continue to crawl over everything. The PCs find themselves having strange and vivid dreams, as Selath plumbs their psyche at night.
At last the PCs catch up with the Stag. There should be a clearing, a battle, the risk of accidentally healing/killing a PC that has been wounded/infected with the antler chitin. Add in Antler Spiders to taste. Yay! They won?
Assuming they do not burn or bury the body, the stag start to dissolve into inanimate spider webs after about half an hour.
The journey going out of the Forest should be where the real difficulties begin. You should add in distractions to try and keep the PCs in the Forest longer, but this stage should be a process of more and more PCs waking up to the fact that they're in danger and need to get out the Forest as quickly as possible. Oh, at this stage also start keeping track of the food and water supplies of the PCs. Some of the main attractions:
Each night, the PCs and their companions will have steadily more disturbing dreams. The porters/guards are weaker mentally, and will be more badly affected more quickly. Roll for the porters each night, with steadily increasing penalties. For each failure, a porter will wake up screaming and run off into the woods at night, never to be seen again. Or maybe they find the porter's half-eaten skeleton a day later. If a fleeing porter is caught before they are lost in the dark, they will report being torn apart by spiders in their dream, over and over, with a sense of doom and inevitability to the experience. Mentally they'll be some combination of shattered, shaky, unwilling to talk, constant sense of doom, unable to sleep, etc. These mental conditions can still be fatal depending on their recovery roles and how well they are cared for. These shattered porters will be more vulnerable to future failures. On future failures, have them try to set some the party's food supplies on fire, or murder Torbruk in his sleep.
For the PCs, start them making rolls on the 2nd or 3rd night. These start off easy but become more difficult each night. On failure, take their memories/dreams that they described earlier in the adventure, but turn them dark and nightmarish. Or use the facts they revealed before as the basic material for the nightmare. Depending on the degree of PC failure, either give them exhaustion, disadvantage, paranoia, or some other progressively worse inability to function.
The pink petal spiders will continue trying to crawl over/near people during the night (and during the day, but especially during the night). If the party makes consistent efforts to clear the spiders out and keep them away, give them a bonus to their rolls to resist these nightmares.
Finding their way out of the Forest is more difficult than chasing the Stag in to the Forest. This should be a difficult role, and doubly so if the person making it does not have some sort of navigation/survival skill. On a marginal failure, the PCs make no progress towards the border of the Forest, and have just been wandering in large circles. On a significant failure, the PCs are turned around enough that they are actually going deeper into the Forest.
If the PCs are starting to get desperate, Selath will come to one of them in a dream. Selath will be in her human form (or a moderately more beautiful dream version of it), and will say that while she was offended by the PCs trespassing in her domain, she will stop her retribution and allow them to leave, provided they give tribute to her. Specifically, she wants a human sacrifice. It can be one of the porters, Torbruk, a PC, who ever. It's the thought that counts. If their head and limbs are cut off and stacked next to a tree, she will allow the remaining travelers to leave her domain unharmed (all lies of course). She will even offer up a antler-spider minion to help the PCs leave the Forest (the spider will lead the PCs deeper into the Forest).
At night, deep in the woods, the PCs will hear the clacking of antler-Spiders for hours and hours. This will continue for a night or 2, before a group of Antler Spiders and Baby spider swarms attack the PCs at night. The baby spiders will descend from the trees to surprise attack, a main party of Antler spiders will launch an assault, and a second party of Antler Spiders will then join in to drag off porters/Torbruk, or else destroy vital supplies/the best navigator amongst the PCs.
If the PCs have completely failed, and end up deep deep deep in the Forest, and are completely lost, and are all haggard with nightmares and out of food and water, have Selath come out and end them. Bump all her stats up considerably, give her advantage on everything since she has completely wormed into the party's mind, have any remaining mind-broken porters turn on the PCs, make the end fast and brutal.
And some of the main distractions:
A large glade where it is always night, centered around a still, dark pond that shows a million stars in perfect clarity. The stars in the pond are mirrored perfectly by the brilliant stars that always hang in the darkness above them. Visually, it is as though there is a cylinder ~300 yards in diameter that has been hung in the air. Inside and beneath the cylinder it is always tarry night, and as the player travel into the glade/underneath the cylinder this night will take up more and more of the sky. Outside the cylinder everything is as normal, and players can see the gradual fuzzy boundary between the night glade and the normal, surrounding sky.
The stars in the pond can be used to make amazingly accurate astrological predictions, though it requires time to study. If any PCs have any astrological skill or inclinations, and they study the pond, they will almost immediately read a great disaster that is written in the stars. This is actually true and not an illusion! The stars will indicate that the village of Orsiano, in the PCs patrol area, will be destroyed. This will setup the next adventure. If the PCs spend more time and are skilled/lucky, they will read that the doomed town will be destroyed 3 weeks hence, and will be destroyed by an ancient Witch. While the prediction is 99% accurate, this fate is not absolutely written in stone (indeed it is written in water). They will not be able to scry the true secret to stopping this doom, and that information will always be just beyond reach.
Besides the Doom of Orsiano, it is possible to make other readings in the pond, and the pond is an unparalleled tool for scrying and forecasting. Feel free to have the pond give up some secrets. But the pond should be tantalizing, and should always promise that with just a little more time, and a little more study, even more secrets can be revealed.
Note that the stars that are in the star pool burn fiercely; anything that actually physically touches them will be burned/melted away in an instant. E.g. trying to grab a star with your hand would just burn a hole through the middle of your hand. The water in the pond is not noticeably warmed by these stars.
The glade has slight somnolent properties, very easy to fall asleep there.
The Pond is of infinite depth, as is the dark cylinder that hangs above the pond.
3 High Elves, keeping a cottage in the woods. Will hear their harp playing. Named Landriel, Lominiel, and Linsweele. They are studying the Forest, and making astrological observations at the Night Glade. They say there is much to learn from the Forest, and that its infectious properties do not corrupt the advanced races like it does the lower ones. They are of course a web-illusion created by Selath. They elves will be moderately but not overly friendly, and where possible they will encourage the party to stay and study the Night Glade, to make use of their hospitality, etc.
If someone stays with the elves, if viable the elves will murder them during the night (smothered by silks). The elves wield longswords in a fight, but at the first hit their illusion will be disrupted and they will dissolve into packed strands of spider webs.
Depending on your PCs and what they have revealed in their earlier flashbacks/dreams, have someone the PCs know come to them in a dream, and give them a reason that they desperately need to turn back and head deeper into the Forest.
Selath will pick the most trusting/open/squirrely party member, and try and sell them on the idea of joining her. The rest of the party is doomed, the Forest will swallow them, but she likes this particular PC's style and Selath does not actually want to hurt them. As the carrot, will show off Selath's beautiful cottage/vacation home, its fine marble floors, the natural hot springs outside, bountiful gardens, cool and flowing pools with coins in them, fine fruit bearing trees (watched over by spiders), silks, meat, places to rest. As the stick, Selath will show this PC the hordes of Antler Spiders just waiting to make their final assault on the party. No need for them all to die, right? Will try to draw this PC off from the rest of the party where they will be safe. Once the PC is isolated, Selath herself will show up to horribly murder them.
A stream, where Torbruk will find a gold nugget (100GP). Can find more gold nuggets (40G) at the rate of about 1 per hour. A mix of real and illusory nuggets, the real ones coming from Selath's treasure and the fake ones from her web illusions. Her Sapphire can also be found in the stream on a critical success, or when the PC's attention is wandering.
A glass tree, full of light-streams in prismatic colors. This is a spike of wild magic, containing unformed spirits. Grew up while the PCs were traveling, will disappear in a similar number of days. Difficult to use, could grant boons (stat boost + aspect of the thing), or just set the PC on fire.
Torbruk will smell the perfume of Fela, his dead wife. Will see her in the distance, being dragged off by Antler-spiders, and will try to run after them. The Spiders will make the chase go for the better part of a day before turning to fight. This is another trick to lure the party back into the Forest.
Greasy the Bear - A very sad and unkempt looking bear, who is actually a man cursed into bear form. Will try to trade them food and water and magic items for money. Is intelligent, but cannot talk except for in vague bear noises. Bring him out if PCs are desperate for supplies and you want to help them, or to give them a chance to get magic items from this adventure. He has an archaic silver badge, and used to be an army commander in the Empire. Was lost to the Forest several hundred years ago, after the Wolf Princess caught him, transformed him into a bear, and made him one of her thralls. He is currently in disfavor, and is in exile to scout and trade outside of the her domain. The Wolf Princess and Selath are on neutral terms, so he is not in enormous danger from her, but he also will not feel any reason to aid the PCs beyond what they pay for.
The PCs make it out of the Forest! There is a sharp border between the Forest and the cleared grassland beyond, so it is very stark stepping out from twilit Forest and into normal, bright daylight. The nearest villages are several miles from the edge of the Forest, but it should be a relatively straight forward matter for the PCs to reach civilization now that the Forest is not hindering them.
Rewards will be very dependent on how the mission actually went. If Torbruk survived and thinks the PCs did at least an OK job at their mission, then the PCs will receive the full pay out. If Torbruk did not survive, the PCs will get 20% of the promised pay out, after weeks of interviews and arbitration. The survival of the porters does not effect of the PC's reward one way or another.
The larger deforestation effort was a success, and clears out room for several new villages to the South of the PCs patrol area. For the next several months, a stream of well paid guards, lumberjacks, caravan masters, etc. will be filtering out of the area and returning home.
In this case what I planned to happen actually happened, but I'm not sure this was actually a great thing. In retrospect the scenario is a bit too rail-roady and not free form enough, since it requires the PCs being misled by illusions in the first, outward-bound half of the journey and then realizing the truth in the second half. If either of those things do not happen, the scenario does not work. The PCs ended up asking any number of intelligent and perceptive questions on the way out, and to my shame I had to fudge a bit about the illusions to keep the adventure on track at all. On the way back a decent fraction of the PCs did a good job of quickly realizing that they needed to get out of the Forest, and then they had zero interest in interacting with any of the various encounters laid out before them. So over and over I would tell them about some distraction I had made, and they would go "nope! get that content away from me!" It did not help that Kiril, the star-druid, for whom I created all sorts of astrology and star-stuff encounters, could not make it to the game for 2 sessions. So the person who was supposed to be most lured in by the distractions was not actually there to be distracted.
Oh right, the other (ludicrous) problem was that I had an overall villain (Selath) who was controlling the spiders and creating the illusions, but I didn't really think of any guaranteed way for the PCs to really find her or fight her? Like there were ways for some of the PCs to follow side-paths and encounter her, but there wasn't really any GM option I had in my back pocket to force or make more likely an encounter, or for them to even really know that she was there. So to their best knowledge they went into the Forest, killed something that was maybe real and then came out. Anyway! I will bring Selath back for another adventure so she is not wasted.
On the positive side, I would single out for praise the black-crystal-eggs, which suck up healing in order to explosively accelerate their growth. These led to several moments that were extremely funny (for me), as PCs that were infected with the eggs desperately ran away from any potential healing, or other PCs remembered at the last possible moment that they absolutely must not heal their companions.
The monsters in this adventure are based on the different stages of the Spider-Stag lifecycle. The basic lifecycle is:
Spider-Stag stabs people with crystal antlers, the crystal shards then gestate into -> Baby antler spiders, which burst forth from their host and go out to feed to grow into -> Adult antler spider, which feed in order to grow into -> Juvenile stag, with the spider now forming the "antlers" of the beast. At this stage the spider starts to concentrate into the more magically powerful black-chitin form. This beast just need foraged plant matter and time to develop into its next and final form -> Adult Spider-stag with full crystal antlers
(an additional pathway is that the Witch-gold that Selath has can act as potential eggs. If it seems needed, they can go out of hibernation and grow into baby antler spiders, starting the cycle anew)
| Health | Defense | Strength | Agility |
|---|---|---|---|
| 8 | 5 | 7 | 5 |
Basics:
A great white stag, with enormous antlers of twisted black chitin (little bit beetle shell, little bit shiny fly carapace)
does not have a face, rather just a mass of undifferentiated flesh
leaves bloody footsteps behind it
When killed, will gradually dissolve into a mass of tightly packed strands of spider web. Process takes about an hour. Similar to how some airplane wings are made of multiple strands of paper that are glued tightly together. All of the Spider monsters will dissolve in this way after death.
Combat:
Defense: Aura of dissolution: The creature has a sense of wrongness about it, a sort of inverse-Awe. Causes gums to bleed and bones to dissolve once they get within 30 feet of the creature
Attack: Trample attack, dex save to avoid heavy damage as it moves through players squares
Attack: Antler stab, does damage but also leaves shards of its antlers-crystal inside the victim. These shards will in time (24 hours) grow to be baby antler-spiders, which will then burst forth from their host.
Ability: Heal steal - the black chitin of the antlers will devour any healing magic used in their vicinity. For the main stag, this will heal the stag instead of the intended target. For any chitin that has been left behind in a wound, this will cause the chitin to rapidly gestate and then explosively birth out into the world as a swarm of baby antler-spiders.
Weaknesses:
fascinated by pure and virginal beauty
its chitin-antlers hold all of its sensory organs and are the source of most of its magical abilities, so it is potentially vulnerable there. E.g. they don't really look like a weak point, but if attacked with sufficient strength/magic the antlers won't be able to function well and its abilities will be at disadvantage or disabled entirely. The rest of the stag's body is just mostly there to move the chitin-antlers around.
Motivations:
be seen majestically posing at a distance
leave its young in corpses.
to make corpses
stab someone with its antlers & leave chitin shards in them, and then have their companions heal them, causing explosive spider growth
be hunted down over hours/days and then turn and fight
| Health | Defense | Strength | Agility |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | 8 | 1 | 7 |
Basics:
a swarm of spiders-things. Each one looks like a tiny bit of sculpture, as if you were taking small bits of antler and assembling them into a spider-shaped figurine. The spider shape does not have tendons, connective tissue, blood, etc. but it still manages to move like a living creature.
Combat:
Ability: Difficult to hit in any meaningful way, since there are so many spiders in the swarm. Also not squishy like a normal spider, instead it's like trying to smash Legos. You have to land a direct and crushing hit, otherwise it just gets knocked out of the way.
Attack: Swarm over a person, and use hundreds of tiny mandibles to devour their skin with
Weaknesses:
fire, thunder, aggressive and concentrated attacks. will flee if it seems faced with a fair fight.
Motivations:
Swarm over a disabled or damaged character
Drop down from trees onto people
scatter and flee into the woods if seriously attacked
| Health | Defense | Strength | Agility |
|---|---|---|---|
| 4 | 6 | 4 | 7 |
Basics:
A Great Dane sized Spider made out of a collection of large antler pieces. Like a creepy living statue/art-project. Has velvet fuzz on the antlers instead of spider hairs, and makes an eerie clacking sound as its antler-legs move against each other, like a wooden puppet being moved
has a small disk of Witch-Gold at its heart (30GP).
Combat:
Ability: Resistance to piercing damage (like a skeleton)
Ability: Leap! Capable of making enormous leaps across a battlefield
Ability: Spray webbing: short distance, Dex check to avoid being restrained
Ability: Active webbing: missed web shots have a rudimentary capability to act. They will try to slurch out to grab and immobilize the legs of anyone that passes within one space of them.
Attack: Bite, moderate damage, moderate to hit. Can use Pack Tactics for advantage on these attacks
Weaknesses:
Meat, has an enormous hunger for food stuffs and meat so that it can start the next phase of its life cycle
Motivations:
terrify and intimidate, as its clicking legs echo through the Forest at night
emerge from shadows and trees to ambush prey. Use some members of its pack to draw attention and get the enemy out of position, before the remainder of the pack emerges to attack any vulnerable or unguarded prey.
immobilize and avoid strong enemies, while swarming and devouring weaker enemies
defeated enemies are ripped up into bloody parts and then dragged off into the Forest to devour later
| Health | Defense | Strength | Agility |
|---|---|---|---|
| 5 | 4 | 4 | 5 |
Basics:
In this stage of development, the spider bifurcates, growing a fleshy stag body to move it around, while its spider-body hardens, becomes black, and starts to focus its magical energy. To an observer this looks like a juvenile but still large stag, with a soft and pale white body. In place of antlers it has a steadily growing jumble of black, chitinous legs sticking up from its head. The creature has not yet grown large enough to trample.
Combat:
Ability: Squirt webbing, like the Antler-Spider
Attack: antler stab, like the Adult Spider-Stag, but slightly worse attack stats. Can still leave chitin-shards in the wounds of people that have been hit
Ability: Heal Steal, as with the Adult Spider-Stag
Weaknesses:
not that good at combat. Will typically only fight in order to back up its more capable brethren. Otherwise will scatter and flee
Motivations:
Finish developing into a full spider-stag
scare off enemies with superior numbers and the appearance of threat, but try to avoid combat
| Health | Defense | Strength | Agility |
|---|---|---|---|
| (Human Form) 6 | 7 | 6 | 7 |
| (Spider Form1) 7 | 6 | 7 | 6 |
| (Spider Form2) 8 | 6 | 8 | 5 |
Basics:
Middle aged and portly lady in her human form. Finely dressed. Her eyes are gold spheres. Carries 4 golden swords in sheaths on her back.
Her domain has clouds of drifting pink rose petals. These twine lazily through the air and about her.
in giant spider form, all red eyes and black & armored chitin. Two of her golden swords are integrated into her new body as her mandibles.
Backstory:
Tried to commit suicide by going into the Forest after her business enterprise collapsed & her debts became insurmountable. Found new life in the Forest.
Roleplaying:
Acts like nobility, arrogant and assuming. Will lie shamelessly and happily about the Forest, her motivations, the world, etc. Behind this Selath is cruel and wants everyone dead and wants to take their valuable goods off of their corpse. Covets fine things like perfumes, silks, flowers. Sort of a mix of aristocrat and CEO. Can be cunning, but also is abrasive and has many blind spots about how normal people think.
Combat:
Ability: if her human form is killed, there is a terrible ripping sound, and a very large spider emerges from her now empty skin-husk. This spider form is the size of a large warhorse, and quite clearly could never be packed inside a human sized form.
Ability: if her spider form is killed, there is a terrible ripping sound, and a very very very large spider emerges from her now empty chitin-husk. This spider form is the size of a tiny house, and quite clearly could never be packed inside of the previous form.
Ability: Slam two of her swords into the ground, transforming them into Golden Guards for the next few minutes.
Ability: Minor psychic reading. Can pick up surface thoughts from other people. Very difficult to launch a surprise attack on her; she usually gets a ~1 second warning before
Ability: Powerful Illusionist. Can use her psychic power to shape her webbing into any number of forms. All of her monsters are basically this, but she can also make houses, walls of blades, treasure chests, people, etc. Depending on the power she invests into these illusions, they are either light cobwebs you can just push through, or just as solid as the real thing.
Attack: In spider form, can fire a massive jet of webbing to restrain and immobilize people over a wide area. The webbing has a basic intelligence and life-energy, and if not used in restraining people, it can reshape itself over the course of a turn into a new Antler-Spider .
Attack: Golden swords/mandibles: moderate hit, moderate damage. Con save, or the golden magic of the swords infects the target and begins converting their life-force into monetary value. The target is at disadvantage and takes minor damage each turn, as golden coins of witch-gold pour out from their coughing mouth. This continues until they make a difficult Con save. In time, if kept in the dark, the coins will start to grow tiny legs & become baby antler spiders.
Weaknesses:
Incredibly greedy. Her desire to kill can also be temporarily assuaged by gifts of silk and gold and other luxury items
Weak to flattery
Motivations:
use her creatures to harry her victims and drive them mad
trade, extort, and betray
Engage in combat, revealing steadily more monstrous forms. Uses various restraining and disabling attacks to try and cripple all enemies before finishing off the weakest ones
| Health | Defense | Strength | Agility |
|---|---|---|---|
| X | X | 1 | 7 |
Basics:
Acts as a living, organic form on the battle field. Looks like floating rose petals, but are as hard and sharp as steel. These petals are light weight and difficult to destroy; they float around harassing people and knocking ranged attacks off course
Combat:
Defense: nearly impossible to destroy, absent some type of acid or crushing magic. Will lose its animating magic if Selath is not near
Attack: Petals swarm out to surround and serrate a target. Does light damage, but also make it more difficult to act
Defense: forms into a nearly solid wall of petals to block movement & interfere with sight. Covers a 30 foot by 5 foot area.
Interrupt: intercepts and interposes itself between an attack that is targeting Selath. Nudge arrows off course, detonate Fireballs prematurely, soak some of the damage from magical rays and such
Weaknesses:
relies completely on Selath for animation and direction. Does not have an independent intelligence or ability to act if she is stunned
Motivations:
harass ranged and mystical PCs to keep them from interfering with Selath.
Intercept and block magical attacks
| Health | Defense | Strength | Agility |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3 | 6 | 5 | 6 |
Basics:
A golden humanoid, featureless and extremely thin. Created when Selath slams one of her golden swords into the ground. On death, will transform back into a sword of Witch-gold
Combat:
Defense: Resist Fire and Cold, Immune Psychic
Attack: metal punch, moderate damage and to-hit
Grapple: twines itself around its target and just holds them in place until Selath can come around to kill them
Weaknesses:
Quite dumb; only knows to run at targets and then punch/restrain them. No understanding of the world beyond that
Motivations:
attack and restrain dangerous PCs to keep them from interfering with Selath