Saturday, November 23, 2019

Dragon spiders and spider dragons?

A concept I found while googling are the dragon spiders aka spider dragons. Dragons with arachnid (or other arthropod) traits, arachnids with draconic traits, or some horrible hybrid of the two? Who knows! They’re just plain creepy and I like it that way.

Some examples of spider dragons include:
  • The arachnidrake from Book of Drakes. It is a winged dragon with arachnid features, and has a swarm of spiders living on its skin.
  • The draconid from Tome of Horrors. It is a giant arachnid with two dragon heads on serpentine necks. No relation to the similar looking slassans below, but you could always posit a connection.
  • The slassan from Arcana Evolved. It is a giant arachnid with a dragon head on a serpentine neck; it is an intelligent creature with mystical abilities. In The Diamond Throne campaign setting, the slassan and mojh were hybrid descendants of the dramojh (fiendish dragons). 

I haven't really worked out any kind of background or theology for it, but I wanted to indulge in some brief world building ideas. I'm thinking that Tiamat, the primordial dragon of chaos and salt water, spawned a number of aberrant dragons. When they entered the mortal world, they appeared in the forms of spiders (a la Ungoliant) but their dragon nature showed through their new forms. And that's where the spider dragons come from.

I had ideas for other connections too. I was thinking of substituting Arcana Evolved's dramojh, slassan, and mojh with the manalishi from OSRIC, aqrabuamelu from MoP, and dragonborn from SRD 5. No firm idea of their relationship yet, maybe in later posts after I defined what the heck a dragon even is supposed to be.

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