Arachnids

Arachnids


The Arachnids are a group of man-sized, bipedal, highly intelligent spider-like beings, whom have a pair of study hind limbs to walking, but also posses 6 other arms, each with a crude pincer/thumb, which they can use with surprising dexterity to create writing, art, fine mechanical items, and more. They can see quite well in the dark, which comes in handy given that the vast majority of them dwell in the caverns of the Underdark, but they are not natively from that subterranean world. Their past is shrouded in mystery, but they were most certainly a surface race just a few generations ago, and are still acclimating to life under the earth.

Arachnids possess an intelligence that, on average, seems slightly more advanced than any other races, humans included. Most Arachnids seem to be capable of mastering most of the modern sciences of the land (chemistry, astronomy, engineering), and a large percentage of their people also dabble in the arcane arts of wizardry and/or alchemy.

Mysterious and Secretive
No other race is as clannish and insular and the Arachnids. While they integrate other races into their society to perform tasks like laboring and soldiering, they tolerate no outside intrusion into the inner workings of their society, or into their history. No one outside of their Underdark homeland knows why they came to dwell under the Kharos Mountains, and no outside scholars are permitted to study their ancient scrolls.

Communal Life
The Arachnid people are clearly spider-like in ancestry, but they have developed a hive-like, cooperative existence now. At the top of their colonies resides a single Queen, whom directs the social life of the Arachnids. The Queen usually appoints male Ministers to preside over the military, economic, or scholarly affairs of the colony, but she sets the overall attitude and direction of the community, which is broken into several castes. These castes include merchants, sages, military members, alchemists, engineers, servants, and more. An arachnid is born into a given caste, based on their parental lineage, and the various castes are almost like their own sub-species, with distinct physical and mental traits separating each group. For example, members of the alchemist caste possess a sense of smell which is several times more powerful than the average, while members of the servant caste posses generally lower IQs and problem-solving skills, but have heightened endurance.

At one point in their far off past, only their Queen was allowed to reproduce, and all colony members were her descendants. Now, the Queen still lays an occasional egg-clutch, but also selects other fit females from each caste of the society to lays eggs as well, freeing her up for political duties. The Queens own offspring receive special treatment, and are considered part of an extended "royal" family, which form a caste of their own, often leading lives of leisure, compared to the other Arachnids. The Queen and her appointed Brood Females lay egg-clutches containing 20-30 eggs, out of which 50-60% of the hatchlings survive past infancy.

The caste system works well for the Arachnids as a whole, and they are very equitable in how they distribute resources (compared to the surface races), but movement between castes is strictly prohibited. Once an individual is born, their birth-caste sets their place in life, unless they display extremely prodigious tendencies towards another. This is rare however, as the Brood Female who lays egg-clutches for a given caste is always from that specific caste, and the males whom vie to mate with her are always top-performing males from that caste as well. If an individual cannot seem to live up to the most menial duties of their birth caste, they are assigned the most demeaning or dangerous jobs of the colony, like waste collection or cave-clearing, which are jobs usually reserved for outside races employed as servants or mercenaries.

Strange Biology
The average female Arachnid is larger than her male counterpart, sometimes as much as twice his mass, and much stronger. Sword-wielding warriors are not overly common among these intellectual people, but when they appear, they are almost always females. Going further back into their ancestry from a time before they were communal, Arachnids sometimes preyed upon each other for food, most notably after mating, where the larger females would sometimes kill and consume weaker males. This brash action is now thankfully quite rare. Arachnid reproduction does not involve any emotions resembling love or pleasure, aside from a general feeling of accomplishment, and is only undertaken by a very small minority of individuals, selected by the community. There is virtually no form of romantic love or pairing up into couples among this race.

The Arachnids are entirely carnivorous and primarily consume farm-raised insects and invertebrates by biting them, injecting them with their enzymatic saliva, and then drinking the liquefied protein slurry from the inside of the creature. Larger animals like birds and mammals sometimes are consumed in this fashion, but most Arachnids report that warm-blooded creatures taste far too "bloody" to be consumed regularly. Plant fiber is completely indigestible to these people, and all animal flesh must be broken down into a pure liquid first as well. Arachnids much prefer to bite and drain live insects when they feed, but due to their communal life, large cauldrons of pre-digested insect stews are prepared for the people, and communal meals are taken in this way. Wealthy Arachnids always eschew these group feasts when possible. The Arachnids are quite unusual creatures in that certain acidic liquids (like vinegar) create in them a drunken state, in much the same way that wine affects the other races. They are master alchemists when it comes to creating these types of acidic beverages, with their quality rivaling that of the finest elvin wines.

Arachnids have 3 very distinct phases of life after being hatched from their egg-sack. They begin life as a small larvae, with 4 arms, no legs, and a wriggling, 3-segemted body, akin to a grub. They posses rudimentary intelligence here, but not enough to hold conversations with non-Arachnids. After around a year as a larvae, once they've doubled in size, they spin a silk cocoon and lay still for another year, tripling in size. From this cocoon, they hatch into the standard Arachnid body form described on this page, and this is the phase that they spend the vast majority of their life in. After an Arachnid has spend 5 or 6 decades as an adult, their intelligence begins to decline, and their temper grows shorter. After a year or so of this change, their body begins growing thick, leather plates, which eventually seal up around the Arachnid completely. As their mobility declines, the old Arachnids will lurtch off to a dark corner to move into their pupal stage. Once immobile, the Arachnid grows at an alarming rate, doubling in size yet again, to be nearly 10ft tall, after the course of several months. When they emerge from this final cocoon, they are completley beastial, possessing no real intelligence, with the form akin to a monsterous beetle, and will attack any living creature on site. The Arachnids do not consider an individual in this stage of life to be the same 'person' they were before, and they will move the cocoon to a safe location prior to its hatching.

Outside Citizens
Strangely for such a bizarre, insular, and conservative race, the Arachnids have no problem bringing in outside races into their society, with something akin to near-citizenship. The Arachnids know they are not particularly suited for tasks like heavy labor soldiering, mining, farming, and bold adventuring, so when these services are needed, they are quick to employ outsiders to perform these tasks. An Arachnid colony might employ a several large families of Duergar Dwarves to operate as the janitors of the colony, or perhaps contract out mining rights in their tunnels to the local Sverniblin Gnomes. They have been known to employ elves and gnomes as their diplomats and merchant liaisons, for example, and these such outsiders are granted full access to owning property and status inside the Arachnid colony. So long as the outside races living there do not become too curious about the inner workings of the society or its history, they are allowed to live freely among the Arachnids. However, once one joins the colony as an outsider, it is not so easy to leave. The Arachnids typically find a way to keep an outsider bound to the group, usually by bringing in a wife or husband for them, and not allowing this spouse to travel to the surface, thus ensuring the return to the colony by the outsider.

Natural Spellcasters and Alchemists
The Arachnid people of the Kingdom of Silk have a very high occurrence of arcane magical talent amongst their people. As much as 30% of the population are spellcasters of some sort, and as such eschew traditional military structures and principles. The bulk of the infantry possessed by this nation are actually non-Arachnids, mostly mercenaries from other races of either Underdark origin, or of surface races whom can see well enough in the dim caverns of this land (rogue Sidhe elves, half-orcs, etc). There are physically gifted Arachnids whom carry on a warrior tradition. They favor attacking with multiple short swords or thin rapiers, wielding as many as four of these blades at a time, although 3 blades and 1 small shield is a very popular and effective combination. It is common for all edges weapons in an Arachnid battle group to be coated in sticky venom, usually derived from the Arachnids' venomous bite itself. Poison has no stigma of evil in Arachnid society, unlike the surface races, because the Arachnids are themselves, naturally venomous These warriors are respected in Arachnid society, but not overly common, and do not possess much (if any) political power.