The image of a massive swarm of spiders lead by a spiderman shepherd as a threat to a biome or the feywild is a fun set piece, but I am also incredibly interested how a village or a clan of ettercaps might look like. Cause they have 7 intellegence which is comparable to your traditional orc, but their lore really doesn't say much about how they interact with others of their kind, neither calling them loners nor cooperative.
It could be like many real life spiders where they are loners until its time to reproduce, even then it could still be dangerous since female spiders are almost as likely to eat the males instead.
@@facelesscleric2744 I assumed that was a bit of a myth, someone told me spider cannabalism is usually rare or restricted to select species where it is common, that even most black widow species will rarely ever eat their mates
But when I visited a Scottish tavern everybody was speaking Scottish, stumbling around, vomiting, one guy in the corner was crying.....Are implying they were actually just drunk?
Fun fact: there is a magical spider from 3.5e that spins fire-proof blood webs. So if you wanna make the encounter 10x scarier and more challenging, there ya go.
I can imagine that importing exotic spiders and/or other critters from the Feywild or other planes of existence would be very lucrative for an Ettercap. I can imagine like an interdimensional black market that deals in deadly creatures with Ettercaps being premier exotic spider breeders. An extra intelligent mutant Ettercap could do some crazy things with some connections and might be a good campaign villain.
something that i think goes underappreciated about ettercaps is the way their illustrations from earlier editions made them *not* look like spiders. they were spiderpeople who weren't literally spiders themselves, and i thought that was really interesting.
Their ancestors were canonicly degenerate arachnophilic druids, who practized a literal fuckton of bestiality and incest in order to turn their offspring into manspiders. Thats also why ettercaps have such a low challengerating by themselves. They are all of them really inbread and unable to do anything about that because they are really rare and all share a common lineage.
fuck yea. I love ettercaps, such an interesting take on a spider person. I also love that they can be threatening, but they could also just be chill dudes, maybe even an ally to the party
@@nathanfivecoate5848 would be fun to give the statblock some druid spells to spice up their combat options as a relic of their origins, spider climb plus thorn whip or grasping vine sounds fun, or sleet storm to put out fires.
@@finderfinder4290 If you want to make a custom ability for a more interesting encounter, you could give it something like Thorn Whip, triple the range, (increasing it to 90' from Thorn Whip's normal 30'), make it not do direct damage, but also pull the target much farther. Could be a Str/Dex save for the target, or an attack roll from the Ettercap and then let the target roll an Athletics/Acrobatics check to see how far they get dragged. Maybe 60' on a failed check and only 30' on a success, because this sort of attack does no damage and is meant to make it easier for the Ettercap to close with it's opponents, especially those at range
I use these boys all the time as a low level threat! A great way to have nature get warped, blight a village, and explain why there are giant insects and strange traps!
The Garotte is really cool and makes them sort of unique as am onster as it uses the rarely-seen suffocation rules. If they can keep your character choked out for a number of rounds equal to your CON mod, you just fall to 0 HP and are dying instantly, and can't be stabilized until they stop choking you. I rand what was supposed to be a moderate encounter but it ended up being very nbearly lethal because the Ettercaps were using this ability to choke PCs who got webbed by the actual spiders.
What's also interesting about Ettercaps is their origin story. They were apparently a circle of druids that specialized in spider forms. They were once human, but stayed in beast mode so much that they started to "go native." After becoming evil cannibals, they were cursed to essentially be stuck in a half-human, half-insectoid form forever, and thus became Ettercaps.
@@zoushaomenohu They look like they were inspired by the Aranea from 3e. They had similar abilities and made their home near Calimshan on the southern end of The Sword Coast. It's a shame WotC can't be bothered to bring more of the older content into play. Strixhaven was fun but I could go for a module set virtually anywhere but the Waterdeep/Neverwinter/Baldurs Gate region. Meanwhile PF 2e has given us huge variety of locales and inhabitants to enjoy.
So, the problem with Ettercaps is that you could design an awesome forest dungeon based around one that would be a challenge even for a relatively high leveled party, but the final boss would be an Ettercap, which the party would wipe the floor with, even if they weren't in great condition due to fighting their way through all of its horrors.
That's precisely the point. The problem isn't a strong monster, it's a tenacious monster. If you reach it, you and it both know you've won. So the challenge is never the slaying
@@OlieB I get that's precisely the point. I suppose my problem is that the dm of my dnd group ALWAYS ends dungeons with a big boss fight so that's what I'm used to. The idea of the one in charge being the weakest monster in the dungeon is strange to me. I suppose that it isn't necessary to have such a boss fight, or you could get creative and have one really massive spider at the end that is guarding the Ettercap with that as the final boss of the dungeon, and the Ettercap just surrenders upon the party defeating the giant spider.
@@anonymoususer188 alternatively, the party reaches the 'end' of the dungeon, kills the ettercap, jokes about how anticlimactic it was... and then feel the ground start to tremble as the monstrous homebrew gargantuan spellcasting spider queen the ettercap had tamed makes her appearance. Just like with the terrain itself, it's all about what the ettercap leaves behind
i could see an ettercap in as silk suit and top had just popin up out of no where at the mere mention of spiders and like a sleazy car salesman just start showing off his spiders like an infomercial "Spiders. ohhh yeaa i got spiders, Big ones little ones fuzzy ones bald ones poisonous ones and cure ones you just wanna hug, gowan take a look they wont try to eat ya. long as you don't look tasty that is "
Yes! One of my favorite monsters ever! Combine with different types of fungus, assassin vines and some poison on iron barred doors. Use tripwires and stuff in combinations with alchemy items from previously eaten adventurers.
One idea I had for my setting is a home brew monster called the fay slayer spider (Working title.) It's sort of like the blink dog and displacer beast that it's a monstrosity that originates from the fay wild. Any way these things as the title suggests love to feed on fey creatures and they have two unique tools to do so. 1 they have true sight that can see through all illusion ( the eyed can be harvested and made into a potion) and their webs cannot be detected by any form of magic. The spiders even know how to weave their webs into crude cloaks around themselves to make them undetectable to magic. (Fay Slayer Silk Cloaks are a very rare item.) There's a major faction in my setting called the Anti Mage Movement (AMM) who'll pay the party good money for Fay Slayer silk, or even a live spider.
i ran into one of these once with a group in a campaign i was in intensive dwarfen brewing and our own clothes are the only reason we survived. half of us were naked and a significant chunk of forest were gone by the time that incident was resolved
I made Lurkwood into one of the major stops in my homebrew campaign and I didn't use ettercaps yet, there is definitely a dark elf influenced spider infestation spreading from the feywild. The spiders use a poison I dubbed "Heartstake" It's a poison which doesn't do much (or any) damage up front, but aside of poisoning you, it stacks. First giving you extra movement speed, then in one or two steps the effects of haste. But when it expires or when you finally succeed on the saving throw (or when the poison gets removed, optionally) you roll to not get paralyzed from the muscle muscle spasms and the damage might kill you as again, it stacks. The stonger the spider the higher the DC and the more stacks it gives. Oh right and there is a tribe of enthralled goblins that are hooked up on the spider venom (or it's refined drug variants). Sometimes they even keep spiders on their bodies to they can get high on their bites. Right, almost forgot. I make fire troublesome by making the smoke from the burning webs toxic as well.
had one of these in a forest cave in a campaign, hanging skeletons encased in webs on the ceiling really added to the mood, and to stop the burning i removed the floor, the webs were the only thing they had to stand on (unless they wanted a large fall)
I like the idea of an ettercap who isn't necessarily evil, just his whole biome is so dangerous that it doesn't matter, and if he encounters the party he acts like he is defending himself from evil raiders
Me: Not everything needs to be resolved with fireball, you know, there's a lot of cool magic that exists and... Also me when I find a Ettercap lair: NOPE NOPE NOPE FIREBALL FIREBALL FIREBALL
I have an entire diverse catalogue of playable insectoids because I believe there is a distinct lack of this in DnD as a whole, and I really like bugs. I have never heard of these, and I'm now happy you've brought them to my attention. Thank you.
Now I imagine Eberron game in Sharn, where there's your friendly neighborhood driderman/ettercapman and an angry fairy journalist. Also, when I rand rogues stand-alone one shot, he got a fight with these baddies, in alliance with two dryads and a pixie. Pixie turned him into a t-rex and called it a day.
Literally sitting down to work out the Ettercap lair for an early adventure in my Hexcrawl and what to my wondering eyes doth appear! Great stuff as always my dude :)
Apparently they are descendants of druids who wild shaped into spiders so often that they loved it and kept doing spider things even when not a wild shaped spider. Somehow that leads to curse or corruption into man spiders.
Actually, fire _wouldn't_ be great for this. I crested a spider bossfight for a oneshot a little time back (including a fey shadowspider of my own creation that became invisible in darkness and could walk through walls) and I needed to find a way to prevent my players from just putting a torch to the webs and call it a day. You know, besides the hostage. But it turned out I didn't need to invent a reason, because spider silk isn't flamable. Yeah a good fire will probably destroy it, but it won't feed one. Add to that that that the entire area is dank, and no forest fires for you.
My partner put ettercaps into a campaign they ran a few years ago and, due to the campaign taking place in an archfey-created demiplane, they were a bit weird. Like I'm talking they ran insurance companies weird. And the ettercaps still bred spiders and weren't HELPFUL (y'know like 99 percent of insurance companies!), but they weren't hostile. Don't remember the details because I sadly wasn't part of that campaign, but the image one of the players for that campaign made featuring a 5e ettercap with a State Farm baseball cap photoshopped onto it will forever be in my brain.
One can use Tasha's Cauldron of Everything and it's table for an Infested Region along with the ideas for traps from the Dungeon Master's Guide. Maybe you could use the Magic Mushrooms table to portray the influence of the Feywild.
I love the idea of Ettercaps kidnapping a couple dozen children only to feed and take care of them so they can use them as hostages to get what they want. If the villagers leave the Ettercaps alone, the children are taken care of an spared then released once they are traumatized adults and they keep doing this to ensure they survive, then once they cannot have a reliable shipment of kiddies or whatever they send in the whole swarm to just wipe out a settlement.
I put my party against an ettercap led spider ambush, and it was the deadliest thing at that point in the campaign. For context, these guys just beat a WHITE DRAGON the encounter before.
I think the easiest way to dissuade liberal use of fire in this situation is to simply point out to the players that they are in fact in the very flammable forest
honestly if players used fire, unless they dealt with the spread of fire, i would have them face real repercussions for burning a section of forest. like. that would lead to a full forest fire, who knows, fey coming after them, druids, conservationists
I own most ghostfire games products, however i want to point out one thing, dungeons of drakkenheim is Mordeheim in dnd, i dont know if the original writer was brought back for it but its literally mordeheim
personally im fine with a "boss" or just antagonistic force like this just being not very tough themselves. In this case the goal would be finding the Ettercap rather then the danger of fighting it, I think in the past i've made the mistake of making every antagonistic being a worthy opponent for the party but i've grown to realize that there are certainly times when its okay for the boss at the end of a encounter or whatever to be much weaker. after all it means you can spend more time fleshing out the Journey and a little less time trying to make a strong monster
I don’t often put a like on a video, but when someone references King Ramses (the man in gauze! The man in gauze!) in a relevant way, I like and subscribe.
Imagine, Harry Styles, I mean big pappa ettercap decides to breed tiny tiny teeny tiny spiders who have weird little bites that i don't know, make you hallucinate or charm you or something, and they're so tiny whenever you enter their zone you roll a dice and boom now its like you got a weird disease but its actually tiny spooders. then your group wants to walk calmly into spider mouths and they don't even notice.
When you fire the local red dragon to kill spiders. No lie though I died after my favorite AD&D encounter after taking 1 point of damage from a spider bite.... followed 15 minutes later by 15 poison damage
Tuckers Ettercaps. Go ahead and let your Ettercap bossfight actually use some of the weapons & armor old caravan guards have left behind. Give some of the spiders a Necrotizing venom that reduces your Max HP with necrotic damage as it rots your flesh. Also, tying paralysis & confusion to the easily-removed Poisoned condition is actually great design, cause even one turn under those effects is terrifying.
Ah yes. Spider-people, weakness to fire and upon sight of them will cause even the most un-intelligible feral creatures of D&D to learn how to cast any fire spell just to kill one of these spider-persons.
I would imagine there's a possibility to find an ettercap egg sac during an encounter of a 'capped forest. Imagine a whole giant sack filled with a thousand gnome-sized ettercaps all wanting to eat each other and anything else near by, plus they have a more concentrated venom. Because baby spiders and all.
Dear smith of runes im here to enquirer about your opinion on the dingo doodles trausqque minifigure specifically if its safer as a doorstop or a garden gnome
I got Stibbles Codex and it is pretty good. My only criticism is that it is catered toward lower levels, but to counter that, all of the pets' non-attack abilities maintain relevance at high levels, the level up table can easily be expanded, the pets don't really need to maintain the same proportional strength, and I can give players magic items for their pets. I like the rules for the pets and they feel very unique. They don't even have to be pets and could just be creatures encountered or even hostile. The dragon type companions are my favorite ones in the book. The Sunken Isles book looks great and I prefer higher level play and want some rules for sailing so the book is really appealing to me..
Ahh another Runesmith video to warm the cockles of my hyart. Question: If these spidermensch are scots, can they spin little kilts for themselves? ..like...Etterkilts
Spiders are some of my favorite animals. I look forward to playing an Ettercap Ranger/Druid. You can imagine how much I loved playing the Warlock in Diablo III.
Idea: a zombie ettercap reanimated by its spiders as a hive. That’s not how spiders work but shut up. It could fight like Shino from Naruto and shoot swarms of spiders at people.
The image of a massive swarm of spiders lead by a spiderman shepherd as a threat to a biome or the feywild is a fun set piece, but I am also incredibly interested how a village or a clan of ettercaps might look like. Cause they have 7 intellegence which is comparable to your traditional orc, but their lore really doesn't say much about how they interact with others of their kind, neither calling them loners nor cooperative.
It could be like many real life spiders where they are loners until its time to reproduce, even then it could still be dangerous since female spiders are almost as likely to eat the males instead.
@Faceless Cleric that is true! The first ettercaps of the forgotten realms were druids that became too spider and started eating each other
They probably go to find a mate during mating season and otherwise are solitary
I'd recommend the lore video of MrRhexx. You can just search "What they don't tell you about Ettercaps".
@@facelesscleric2744 I assumed that was a bit of a myth, someone told me spider cannabalism is usually rare or restricted to select species where it is common, that even most black widow species will rarely ever eat their mates
"No one speaks Scottish"
My ass over here learning Gaelic: "hey...yeah that's true."
Same. Scottish Gaelic is hard as shit and nobody speaks it fluently to practice with lol.
Same Lol 😆😂
Not even the Scots speak Scots, which is impressive
Yaaa yer get daff coont!
But when I visited a Scottish tavern everybody was speaking Scottish, stumbling around, vomiting, one guy in the corner was crying.....Are implying they were actually just drunk?
Fun fact: there is a magical spider from 3.5e that spins fire-proof blood webs. So if you wanna make the encounter 10x scarier and more challenging, there ya go.
I can imagine that importing exotic spiders and/or other critters from the Feywild or other planes of existence would be very lucrative for an Ettercap. I can imagine like an interdimensional black market that deals in deadly creatures with Ettercaps being premier exotic spider breeders. An extra intelligent mutant Ettercap could do some crazy things with some connections and might be a good campaign villain.
Noted.
something that i think goes underappreciated about ettercaps is the way their illustrations from earlier editions made them *not* look like spiders. they were spiderpeople who weren't literally spiders themselves, and i thought that was really interesting.
Their ancestors were canonicly degenerate arachnophilic druids, who practized a literal fuckton of bestiality and incest in order to turn their offspring into manspiders. Thats also why ettercaps have such a low challengerating by themselves. They are all of them really inbread
and unable to do anything about that because they are really rare and all share a common lineage.
i agree! and how the monster manual describes them as “shepherds”
In this case, just let the Wizard cast all the Fireballs they want…
Paladin: "They have hostages!"
Sorc: "Dead when we got here. MAXIMIZED FIREBALL"
Fireball the whole place from orbit. The only way to be sure
Fireball does not set things on fire as raw
Consider adding a healthy mix of Fire Bolt and Create Bonfire for all your spider related needs
"Oh no but the trees will set on fire."
@@flumphflumph6021Good, they'll sustain the fire longer
fuck yea. I love ettercaps, such an interesting take on a spider person. I also love that they can be threatening, but they could also just be chill dudes, maybe even an ally to the party
Honestly this guy could totally be made into a pc, like a Druid that has just a mobile spider army
They used to be druids, originally
I figure a Thri-Kreen could maybe be reflavored to an Ettercap? Slap a Swarmkeeper Ranger on there and bam, you've got an Ettercap PC
@@nathanfivecoate5848 would be fun to give the statblock some druid spells to spice up their combat options as a relic of their origins, spider climb plus thorn whip or grasping vine sounds fun, or sleet storm to put out fires.
@@finderfinder4290 If you want to make a custom ability for a more interesting encounter, you could give it something like Thorn Whip, triple the range, (increasing it to 90' from Thorn Whip's normal 30'), make it not do direct damage, but also pull the target much farther. Could be a Str/Dex save for the target, or an attack roll from the Ettercap and then let the target roll an Athletics/Acrobatics check to see how far they get dragged. Maybe 60' on a failed check and only 30' on a success, because this sort of attack does no damage and is meant to make it easier for the Ettercap to close with it's opponents, especially those at range
I use these boys all the time as a low level threat! A great way to have nature get warped, blight a village, and explain why there are giant insects and strange traps!
The Garotte is really cool and makes them sort of unique as am onster as it uses the rarely-seen suffocation rules. If they can keep your character choked out for a number of rounds equal to your CON mod, you just fall to 0 HP and are dying instantly, and can't be stabilized until they stop choking you. I rand what was supposed to be a moderate encounter but it ended up being very nbearly lethal because the Ettercaps were using this ability to choke PCs who got webbed by the actual spiders.
What's also interesting about Ettercaps is their origin story. They were apparently a circle of druids that specialized in spider forms. They were once human, but stayed in beast mode so much that they started to "go native."
After becoming evil cannibals, they were cursed to essentially be stuck in a half-human, half-insectoid form forever, and thus became Ettercaps.
Arachnid (arachnoid?), not insectoid
@@juliandacosta6841 Oops, my bad.
I got excited for a second hoping for Anadi. I love me some adorable jumping spider people
They are one of the BEST additions to Pathfinder EVER!
@@zoushaomenohu They look like they were inspired by the Aranea from 3e. They had similar abilities and made their home near Calimshan on the southern end of The Sword Coast. It's a shame WotC can't be bothered to bring more of the older content into play. Strixhaven was fun but I could go for a module set virtually anywhere but the Waterdeep/Neverwinter/Baldurs Gate region. Meanwhile PF 2e has given us huge variety of locales and inhabitants to enjoy.
I used Ettercaps as noble forest guardians in my campaign who were Shepards to big cow spiders.
I love this!
Sir, you basically just recreated Futurama’s version of Mars
@@phntmthf5505 D&D had horsespiders in the 80s. They're the less cool cousin to the owlbear
Maybe on a planet in Spelljammer?
So, the problem with Ettercaps is that you could design an awesome forest dungeon based around one that would be a challenge even for a relatively high leveled party, but the final boss would be an Ettercap, which the party would wipe the floor with, even if they weren't in great condition due to fighting their way through all of its horrors.
That's precisely the point. The problem isn't a strong monster, it's a tenacious monster. If you reach it, you and it both know you've won. So the challenge is never the slaying
@@OlieB I get that's precisely the point. I suppose my problem is that the dm of my dnd group ALWAYS ends dungeons with a big boss fight so that's what I'm used to. The idea of the one in charge being the weakest monster in the dungeon is strange to me. I suppose that it isn't necessary to have such a boss fight, or you could get creative and have one really massive spider at the end that is guarding the Ettercap with that as the final boss of the dungeon, and the Ettercap just surrenders upon the party defeating the giant spider.
@@anonymoususer188 alternatively, the party reaches the 'end' of the dungeon, kills the ettercap, jokes about how anticlimactic it was... and then feel the ground start to tremble as the monstrous homebrew gargantuan spellcasting spider queen the ettercap had tamed makes her appearance. Just like with the terrain itself, it's all about what the ettercap leaves behind
i could see an ettercap in as silk suit and top had just popin up out of no where at the mere mention of spiders and like a sleazy car salesman just start showing off his spiders like an infomercial
"Spiders. ohhh yeaa i got spiders, Big ones little ones fuzzy ones bald ones poisonous ones and cure ones you just wanna hug, gowan take a look they wont try to eat ya. long as you don't look tasty that is "
Yes! One of my favorite monsters ever! Combine with different types of fungus, assassin vines and some poison on iron barred doors. Use tripwires and stuff in combinations with alchemy items from previously eaten adventurers.
One idea I had for my setting is a home brew monster called the fay slayer spider (Working title.) It's sort of like the blink dog and displacer beast that it's a monstrosity that originates from the fay wild. Any way these things as the title suggests love to feed on fey creatures and they have two unique tools to do so. 1 they have true sight that can see through all illusion ( the eyed can be harvested and made into a potion) and their webs cannot be detected by any form of magic. The spiders even know how to weave their webs into crude cloaks around themselves to make them undetectable to magic. (Fay Slayer Silk Cloaks are a very rare item.) There's a major faction in my setting called the Anti Mage Movement (AMM) who'll pay the party good money for Fay Slayer silk, or even a live spider.
That's awesome
@@Lukasaske I remembered it when he said they eat fay creatures.
i ran into one of these once with a group in a campaign i was in
intensive dwarfen brewing and our own clothes are the only reason we survived. half of us were naked and a significant chunk of forest were gone by the time that incident was resolved
there was a lot of fire i'm guessing?
It's really interesting how a whole complex and challenging adventure can be made based off a mere CR 2 creature.
I made Lurkwood into one of the major stops in my homebrew campaign and I didn't use ettercaps yet, there is definitely a dark elf influenced spider infestation spreading from the feywild.
The spiders use a poison I dubbed "Heartstake" It's a poison which doesn't do much (or any) damage up front, but aside of poisoning you, it stacks. First giving you extra movement speed, then in one or two steps the effects of haste. But when it expires or when you finally succeed on the saving throw (or when the poison gets removed, optionally) you roll to not get paralyzed from the muscle muscle spasms and the damage might kill you as again, it stacks. The stonger the spider the higher the DC and the more stacks it gives.
Oh right and there is a tribe of enthralled goblins that are hooked up on the spider venom (or it's refined drug variants).
Sometimes they even keep spiders on their bodies to they can get high on their bites.
Right, almost forgot. I make fire troublesome by making the smoke from the burning webs toxic as well.
These guys would make such a great first encouter kinda situation. I've never DM'd before and just got the curse of strahd book
had one of these in a forest cave in a campaign, hanging skeletons encased in webs on the ceiling really added to the mood, and to stop the burning i removed the floor, the webs were the only thing they had to stand on (unless they wanted a large fall)
ooooh good idea!
I once (about 2010) ran a game where the first thing that almost wiped out the party was a pair of ettercaps and their crawlies. Good times!
I love these videos where it's basically like optimizing but for a DM
I like the idea of an ettercap who isn't necessarily evil, just his whole biome is so dangerous that it doesn't matter, and if he encounters the party he acts like he is defending himself from evil raiders
They could have a way to add humidity to the environment in some weird way, or just set up in wet areas so that the webs can’t burn.
Me: Not everything needs to be resolved with fireball, you know, there's a lot of cool magic that exists and...
Also me when I find a Ettercap lair: NOPE NOPE NOPE FIREBALL FIREBALL FIREBALL
I have an entire diverse catalogue of playable insectoids because I believe there is a distinct lack of this in DnD as a whole, and I really like bugs. I have never heard of these, and I'm now happy you've brought them to my attention. Thank you.
Shepherd of monsters is always was interesnting idea for me, but that dude is really scary. Especially becouse of diet on fairies.
Now I imagine Eberron game in Sharn, where there's your friendly neighborhood driderman/ettercapman and an angry fairy journalist.
Also, when I rand rogues stand-alone one shot, he got a fight with these baddies, in alliance with two dryads and a pixie. Pixie turned him into a t-rex and called it a day.
I never fully appreciated these weird little guys. Thank you for opening my eyes
Literally sitting down to work out the Ettercap lair for an early adventure in my Hexcrawl and what to my wondering eyes doth appear! Great stuff as always my dude :)
Apparently they are descendants of druids who wild shaped into spiders so often that they loved it and kept doing spider things even when not a wild shaped spider.
Somehow that leads to curse or corruption into man spiders.
Actually, fire _wouldn't_ be great for this.
I crested a spider bossfight for a oneshot a little time back (including a fey shadowspider of my own creation that became invisible in darkness and could walk through walls) and I needed to find a way to prevent my players from just putting a torch to the webs and call it a day. You know, besides the hostage.
But it turned out I didn't need to invent a reason, because spider silk isn't flamable. Yeah a good fire will probably destroy it, but it won't feed one. Add to that that that the entire area is dank, and no forest fires for you.
The far side of the Ettercaps domain is Black Dragon territory with a usurper Necromancer for flavor.
My partner put ettercaps into a campaign they ran a few years ago and, due to the campaign taking place in an archfey-created demiplane, they were a bit weird. Like I'm talking they ran insurance companies weird. And the ettercaps still bred spiders and weren't HELPFUL (y'know like 99 percent of insurance companies!), but they weren't hostile.
Don't remember the details because I sadly wasn't part of that campaign, but the image one of the players for that campaign made featuring a 5e ettercap with a State Farm baseball cap photoshopped onto it will forever be in my brain.
One can use Tasha's Cauldron of Everything and it's table for an Infested Region along with the ideas for traps from the Dungeon Master's Guide. Maybe you could use the Magic Mushrooms table to portray the influence of the Feywild.
Honestly ive always loved these guys, would love to run one someday. They could even be a patron for a more evil (or at least morally lenient) party
I love the idea of Ettercaps kidnapping a couple dozen children only to feed and take care of them so they can use them as hostages to get what they want. If the villagers leave the Ettercaps alone, the children are taken care of an spared then released once they are traumatized adults and they keep doing this to ensure they survive, then once they cannot have a reliable shipment of kiddies or whatever they send in the whole swarm to just wipe out a settlement.
'Dorable Fellas~
Artillerists artificers get a basically infinite use flame thrower at level 3. Sounds like an easy win.
4:45 that's definitely Snakes and Ladders
Now I understand why J. R. R. Tolkien wrote Bilbo Baggins calling all the spiders in the forest "Attercops". It's a "ye olde" version of Ettercaps.
Ettercap assassins is where it is at for stories/encounters
I put my party against an ettercap led spider ambush, and it was the deadliest thing at that point in the campaign. For context, these guys just beat a WHITE DRAGON the encounter before.
I had an idea, giving ettercaps xenomorph Eggs.
one of my players is a fey, who is just trying to get home...this is a good "end of story" quest to get her home
I think the easiest way to dissuade liberal use of fire in this situation is to simply point out to the players that they are in fact in the very flammable forest
honestly if players used fire, unless they dealt with the spread of fire, i would have them face real repercussions for burning a section of forest. like. that would lead to a full forest fire, who knows, fey coming after them, druids, conservationists
3:23 I hate you for uncovering the trauma that is the troll movie.
Ettercaps appear in the first Baldur's Gate.
I own most ghostfire games products, however i want to point out one thing, dungeons of drakkenheim is Mordeheim in dnd, i dont know if the original writer was brought back for it but its literally mordeheim
Everybody gangsta until the friendly neighborhood cleric of loth or drow druid befriends some ettercaps.
personally im fine with a "boss" or just antagonistic force like this just being not very tough themselves. In this case the goal would be finding the Ettercap rather then the danger of fighting it, I think in the past i've made the mistake of making every antagonistic being a worthy opponent for the party but i've grown to realize that there are certainly times when its okay for the boss at the end of a encounter or whatever to be much weaker. after all it means you can spend more time fleshing out the Journey and a little less time trying to make a strong monster
I don’t often put a like on a video, but when someone references King Ramses (the man in gauze! The man in gauze!) in a relevant way, I like and subscribe.
I've always wanted to run one (or more) of these, but the number of adds you'd have to put in the map sounds like a DM nightmare >.
Don’t forget to throw in the Infested Zone from TCoE
Etter 47 disguised as a nobleman's captured daughter ganks you in the woods. Now that's how you gain dm infamy.
Imagine, Harry Styles, I mean big pappa ettercap decides to breed tiny tiny teeny tiny spiders who have weird little bites that i don't know, make you hallucinate or charm you or something, and they're so tiny whenever you enter their zone you roll a dice and boom now its like you got a weird disease but its actually tiny spooders. then your group wants to walk calmly into spider mouths and they don't even notice.
When you fire the local red dragon to kill spiders. No lie though I died after my favorite AD&D encounter after taking 1 point of damage from a spider bite.... followed 15 minutes later by 15 poison damage
I can’t wait to use all of these when I find friends who aren’t fed up with my shit as a dm
As a Scottish, I can confirm, we dont speak Scottish.
(I tried to learn Gaelic once and I remember almost none of it)
1:28: epic nope!
I’ve realized that this is just National Geographic for fantasy animals
Like the old lore about some Druids that where a little to Spider Friendly.
I cannot deny my children fresh meat when it wanders so willingly into our midst. Goodbye, "friends of Hagrid's"
Tuckers Ettercaps.
Go ahead and let your Ettercap bossfight actually use some of the weapons & armor old caravan guards have left behind.
Give some of the spiders a Necrotizing venom that reduces your Max HP with necrotic damage as it rots your flesh.
Also, tying paralysis & confusion to the easily-removed Poisoned condition is actually great design, cause even one turn under those effects is terrifying.
A PC version of this might be nice, wouldn't be the first time we'd have playable monsters.
The Guy with the slab 🤣🤣🤣 love it!
I never thought I would relate so much to a dnd monster
Ah yes. Spider-people, weakness to fire and upon sight of them will cause even the most un-intelligible feral creatures of D&D to learn how to cast any fire spell just to kill one of these spider-persons.
Wow, a Troll 2 clip. Also ettercaps are an awesome antagonist.
I would imagine there's a possibility to find an ettercap egg sac during an encounter of a 'capped forest. Imagine a whole giant sack filled with a thousand gnome-sized ettercaps all wanting to eat each other and anything else near by, plus they have a more concentrated venom. Because baby spiders and all.
F@cking Spooderman Got Dayum
awesome vid thanks for the encounter inspo
This is a massive nightmare for me
Dear smith of runes im here to enquirer about your opinion on the dingo doodles trausqque minifigure specifically if its safer as a doorstop or a garden gnome
don't put it near actual garden gnomes, it eats those
It's the Pyromancer's time to shine.
finally something that counters Fay BS.
On the one hand, they kill fey... One the other hand spiders...
The ettercap design and art from Neverwinter Nights is my favorite version.
You just doomed my players to have to fight a spider druid now...
Spiderman, Spiderman, Oh jesus he's actually a spider get away from me man
I got Stibbles Codex and it is pretty good. My only criticism is that it is catered toward lower levels, but to counter that, all of the pets' non-attack abilities maintain relevance at high levels, the level up table can easily be expanded, the pets don't really need to maintain the same proportional strength, and I can give players magic items for their pets. I like the rules for the pets and they feel very unique. They don't even have to be pets and could just be creatures encountered or even hostile. The dragon type companions are my favorite ones in the book.
The Sunken Isles book looks great and I prefer higher level play and want some rules for sailing so the book is really appealing to me..
Unfriendly neighborhood manspider.
Dang! I had no idea about the Feywild portal thing. 🤔
Ahh another Runesmith video to warm the cockles of my hyart. Question: If these spidermensch are scots, can they spin little kilts for themselves? ..like...Etterkilts
Time to kill my party with the Brazilian wandering spider
0:44 sponsored segment ends
God this video was only finalized a few hours ago?
I need an rts where you play as an expanding ettercap
1:26 Ha!
Spiders are some of my favorite animals. I look forward to playing an Ettercap Ranger/Druid. You can imagine how much I loved playing the Warlock in Diablo III.
...That ring-leader example makes me want to see an Ettercap Circus. *Gets visual image of Ettercap Clown.* ...Never mind.
the Spore reference! you are amazing runesmith
Ettercaps are a party wipe waiting to happen.
I used these guys for a mini arc in my game recently! Partyoved it and got some good encounters out of them
Return the slab.
One this video created so much in my head
Thank you very much, Lettercraftsmen, do do more
Sounds like fun for the dm encounter
Idea: a zombie ettercap reanimated by its spiders as a hive. That’s not how spiders work but shut up. It could fight like Shino from Naruto and shoot swarms of spiders at people.