Ari Diaries: Musing Prior to Session

[kiya]

From the brain of Arissandra Windshadow.


Spiders are very interesting.

I don't know them from the inside yet - I haven't yet figured out how to do without a spine - which separates them somewhat from the full range of my understanding. Working on that.

But.

They are predators. Lots of them are trap predators, or ambush hunters, or throwing webs, or disguise hunters, but some are chase hunters. The females are larger than the males, and often eat them. Their silk is very strong - we're so large we don't think of it, but they're both strong and stretchy which is why clumsy or unobservant people have such problems going through webs from even ordinary spiders. They have poison, and dissolve their prey for eating.

The really big ones, the ones that hunt large bipeds, they're the same as the ordinary ones, really, just bigger. More likely to know magical tricks to go with the rest of their tricks. Build webs, throw webs, jump, chase, ambush, trap, poison. (Some phase spiders nearly killed me once, with poison.)

Drow like spiders.

They weave schemes, attack from ambush. They poison. Their women hold the power, and their men are eaten by their society, if not necessarily literally. There is tension between the castes and the chaos of Lolth; there is battle between the houses, mostly conducted by assassin, poison, social defeat, the crushing of the weaker-willed.

This book we took from one who tried to kill us, one drow priestess, I study it. To become a creature is more than taking its shape: it is learning how its mind works, how it hunts, how it lairs, how it sleeps, and then abandoning learning to simply be. The art of the shapechange is not merely a skill at pretending to be other. Animals are easier, their bodies hold their minds in a particular way and that can flow outwards with the form. Another elf ... another elf is much harder.

There are spiders who hunt spiders, tapping their webs to sound like a struggling fly or moth, drawing them out.

Arissandra learns to become Aranea.

Comments

[suzanne.livejournal.com]

I keep trying to read this on and off today. I start with firm warning to myself that yes, it contains spiders, but there are interesting ideas I might be interested in. So please ignore the spiders and concentrate please.

But I keep running into spiders.

[kiya]

Alas. But that's how the druid makes sense of spider-worshipping people. Start with the animals; animals make sense. :}