Socotran Cave Spiders

Description

Endemic island fauna taken to its evolutionary extreme — isolated in a limestone cave system for millennia with nothing to check them. Not Mythos. Just nature, and worse for it.

Drones are dog-sized, pale cream-white, and nearly translucent, with far too many legs to be anything a sane person would want to look at directly. They hunt by vibration and air movement; their eyes are vestigial. In the dark they come from above, from behind, and out of crevices, in near silence.

Breeders are pony-sized, with bloated abdomens and thick front legs braced against the stone. They stay deep, crouched over the egg wall, and are only seen by people who have gone much further in than they should have.

They are not malicious. They are predators following instinct: take prey to the cocoon chamber, keep it alive and paralysed, and feed on it slowly over days.

Abilities

Drone

Breeder

The cocoon chamber: 1/1D6. Seeing a conscious victim fed upon: 1/1D8.

Venom. Paralytic rather than lethal. The victim is immobilised within thirty to sixty seconds and stays conscious throughout. Wrapping takes under two minutes. The paralysis wears off in one to two hours; a freed victim is dead weight until it does. Survivors carry lingering numbness, nightmares about silk, and a flinch response to cobwebs.

Weaknesses

• Sunlight. They freeze and retreat from it and will not cross a sunlit patch. They stop dead at the shadow line of a cave mouth and do not follow into daylight.
• Fire. Open flame holds them back inside roughly a six-foot circle. They withdraw rather than flee, and probe around the edges of it.
• Their own webs. The silk is highly flammable and fire runs along it, clearing passages — at the cost of smoke, thinning air, and any cocoon connected to what is burning.
• Their own senses. They read the web network by vibration, which means a deliberate, sustained noise against stone confuses them for a few seconds.

Encounters

Socotra, early October 1814 (Socotra Cave Rescue). Drones took Jumman from the shade of the cave mouth and Freddy shortly after, leaving only a puddle, the impression of a barrel, and an unlit torch. The party burned the webbing at the tunnel junction, drove the drones to the edges of the torchlight, and found the breeders crouched over the egg wall deeper in — a sight that broke Adrien’s composure entirely. Both victims were cut down alive. One drone dropped on Holt as he sawed at Freddy’s cocoon and bit him through the chest; it was crushed between Holt and Freddy when the human pyramid beneath them collapsed. One drone confirmed dead. The nest is otherwise intact.

Appearances