Recently in the 4E campaign I’m running for my kids, the party had a little detour to the Feywild, to rescue a unicorn foal from some evil fey brigands. When designing the short adventure, I was casting around for a suitable ‘nasty’ to be the boss of the bandits. I wanted to bring out a specific aspect of the Feywild – the concept that you can never quite trust what you see; that all is potentially a glamour or trick of the mind.
Not being able to find exactly what I wanted, I decided to design my own, and after a little brainstorming came up with the idea of a type of intelligent giant spider which could also take on other forms in order to deceive the characters, and would be masters of illusion – and so the Spider Fey were born.
One of the things I like best about 4E is the ease of creating new monsters using the Adventure Tools, and the ability to pillage neat powers from throughout the Monster List or Compendium. There are so many available that you seldom have to create a power from scratch, but simply give it a little twist perhaps to find the right flavour. The Spider Fey have powers drawn from other types of spider and from creatures with similar powers (e.g. Gnome arcanist …) to to the style I was looking for. I also took some inspiration from the recent Heroes of the Feywild book to give one type of Spider Fey some cool evil witchcraft powers!
And so I’m pleased to present the first Monster offerring for the Content Corner column! Hope you enjoy it. If you do, let me know in the comments 🙂
Tolrendor DM's Blog 
Hey, so I know this entry is super old already but I just wanted to let you know i’m borrowing some of these Spider Fey stats for a 5e oneshot i’m running based in my own world and will be keeping the homebrewed spider fey in the lore of my world! I had to adjust the stats slightly to fit in the 5e setting and to have a slightly lower CR (my players will be lower levels), but honestly yours were the closest i could find to what i had been imagining in my head! especially when it comes to the shape-changing factor (One of my NPCs who will travel with the group is secretly a Fey Spider Trickster who tries to mislead the group away from finding the Venom Witch/Spider Queen’s lair!) I couldn’t have asked for a better foundation to work from!
Thanks!
Sam
You’re right, it has been a long time, but I still remember that Feywild encounter well! Thanks very much for the positive comment and I hope your adventure rocks!
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