Homebrew Arachnida Species Details

Arachnida have spider like features and a web sack. Their bodies are encased in a protective exoskeleton chitin. They can use the built up silk in their silk gland to spin silk, either for combat purposes or for making tailoring goods.

The Arachnida, like their less human counter parts, have chelicerae mandables which in some cases can produce a poison or a toxin depending on where the Arachnida born.

Arachnidas also can speak telepathically to spiders and other arachnids, sometimes keeping the less humanoid halves as pets.

Creating Your Character

When you create your D&D character, you decide whether your character is a member of the human race or one of the game’s fantastical races. If you create a character using a race option presented here, follow these additional rules during character creation.

Ability Score Increases

When determining your character’s ability scores, increase one of those scores by 2 and increase a different score by 1, or increase three different scores by 1. Follow this rule regardless of the method you use to determine the scores, such as rolling or point buy.

The “Quick Build” section for your character’s class offers suggestions on which scores to increase. You’re free to follow those suggestions or to ignore them. Whichever scores you decide to increase, none of the scores can be raised above 20.

Languages

Your character can speak, read, and write Common and one other language that you and your DM agree is appropriate for the character. The Player’s Handbook offers a list of widespread languages to choose from. The DM is free to add or remove languages from that list for a particular campaign.

Creature Type

Every creature in D&D, including every player character, has a special tag in the rules that identifies the type of creature they are. Most player characters are of the Humanoid type. A race option presented here tells you what your character’s creature type is.

Here’s a list of the game’s creature types in alphabetical order: Aberration, Beast, Celestial, Construct, Dragon, Elemental, Fey, Fiend, Giant, Humanoid, Monstrosity, Ooze, Plant, Undead. These types don’t have rules themselves, but some rules in the game affect creatures of certain types in different ways. For example, the text of the cure wounds spell specifies that the spell doesn’t work on a creature that has the Construct type. (The autognome is a noteworthy exception because of its Healing Machine trait.)

Life Span

The typical life span of a player character in the D&D multiverse is about a century, assuming the character doesn’t meet a violent end on an adventure. Members of some races, such as dwarves and elves, can live for centuries—a fact noted in the description of the race in question.

Height and Weight

Player characters, regardless of race, typically fall into the same ranges of height and weight that humans have in our world. If you’d like to determine your character’s height or weight randomly, consult the Random Height and Weight table in the Player’s Handbook, and choose the row in the table that best represents the build you imagine for your character.

Arachnida Traits

As an arachnida player character, you have the following traits.

Creature Type

You are a Monstrosity.

Size

You are Medium or Small. You choose the size when you select this race.

Speed

Your walking speed is 30 feet.

Exoskeleton Carapace

While you aren’t wearing armor, your carapace gives you a base Armor Class of 13 + your Dexterity modifier + 2

Darkvision

You can see in dim light within 60 feet of yourself as if it were bright light, and in darkness as if it were dim light. You discern colors in that darkness only as shades of gray.

Chelicerae Mandables

You have two mouthparts equipped with fangs that can be used to make an unarmed attack that deals 1d4 piercing damage on a hit.

Silk-Spinning

Thanks to your silk glands and spinneret you can produce your own spider silk ,which you roll a d6 for, and use it for combat restrained an enemy within five feet of you or make them blinded if they have a lower strength roll than your slight of hand roll. You can also turn the silk into a blanket, rope or string.

Arachnida Telepathy

Without magic, you can use telepathy, magically transmitting your thoughts mentally to any Arachnid or another member of your race within 120 ft. of yourself. The telepathic link is broken if the distance between you is more than 120 ft., if you are incapacitated, or if you mentally breaks the contact (no action required).

Secondary Arms

You have two slightly smaller secondary arms below your primary pair of arms. The secondary arms can manipulate an object, open or close a door or container, pick up or set down a Tiny object, or wield a weapon that has the light property.

Lolth's Curse

Your ancestors rebeled against Lolth, their creator and so were exiled from the Underdark. They were forced to devolve from their Drider apperance into a more humanoid form but once per day you can transform into this ancient form and as you do, use the Ancient Arachnida Drider stat block for the transformation. You can also transform your self into a tiny spider which has no limit and you are classed as a spider from the monster manual.