Web of the Patient Aunt
The corridor gives out onto a ledge, and the ledge gives out onto a shaft — a round throat of dressed stone thirty feet across that goes up past your light and down past your nerve. It is not empty. Sheet after sheet of web is strung across it at intervals, flat and taut as drum-skins, one every twenty feet all the way down.
The sheet at your level is close enough to touch. It is grey, and clean, and somebody has swept it.
Far above, something shifts its weight, and every strand in the shaft moves a quarter of an inch.
DM summary. Thirty feet of taut web between the party and the far ledge, and a Web-Fey Spinner overhead who reads the shaft the way you read a page. She is not hostile. She is listening, and every mistake is a note she hears.
Terrain & Features
Battle map: custom map. A 30-ft-diameter shaft 180 ft tall with web sheets every 20 ft — run it off a side-view sketch, not a floor plan. Browse the book if a page half fits your table better.
- Dimensions. A shaft 30 ft in diameter, 120 ft deep below the party's level and at least 60 ft above it. The entry ledge is 8 ft × 12 ft on the east side; the exit ledge is 30 ft across the shaft and 15 ft higher, on the west.
- Light. None in the shaft. Anything the party lights makes them the only lit thing in a hundred and eighty feet of dark, and the Aunt has excellent eyes.
- The sheets. Horizontal webs at 20-ft intervals down the shaft. Each will hold a full-grown person: crossing one is walking on a trampoline that is listening. A creature that falls through a sheet lands on the next one 20 ft down (2d6 and restrained, Escape DC 13).
- The strands. Every sheet is anchored to the wall by eight tension strands running up the shaft to the Aunt's shelf. This is the alarm and it is also the floor. Cutting one drops that quarter of the sheet.
- The mason's ledge. A 6-inch course of projecting stone runs the full circumference at the party's level, left over from the shaft's construction. It is an alternative to the web and it is a bad one.
- The Aunt's shelf. 40 ft up on the north wall, a stone corbel with a household on it: a swept floor, a rolled sheet like a rug, and four bundles hung up neatly.
- The old catch. 20 ft below the crossing sheet, in the web, a wrapped bundle the size of a man with a surveyor's chain trailing out of it.
Encounter
Only if the shaft tells her three times.
| Count | Creature | XP each |
|---|---|---|
| 4 | Weaver Spider | 700 |
| 1 | Web-Fey Spinner | 1,800 |
Base 4,600 XP; ×2 for five bodies = 9,200 adjusted, against the APL 9 Hard budget of 9,600. Fought in a shaft, on webs, against things that walk on walls, those numbers understate it considerably — which is why the room is an Avoidable Threat and not a Gauntlet.
Why she is not attacking. She is not hunting. She has four bundles hung up and food enough for a month, and she is a house-proud creature in the middle of a long, dull tenancy. She will talk to anything that talks. She will kill anything that lies to her twice or cuts her web without asking.
The pluck count. This is the room's clock and it counts mistakes, not rounds. Track it out loud.
| Plucks | What happens |
|---|---|
| 1 | A voice from above, in unhurried Greek: "Who is that, then?" Nothing else. She is asking |
| 2 | Two Weaver Spiders come down the wall at speed and stop 15 ft away, watching. They do not attack. This is the last warning and it looks like one |
| 3 | She cuts the crossing sheet's north anchors. Dexterity save DC 15 or fall 20 ft to the next sheet, prone and restrained. Initiative |
Round 1, if it comes to that. The Weaver Spiders restrain and retreat up a strand; they never stay in reach. The Aunt re-spins terrain instead of attacking — her first action is always to close the exit ledge with a fresh sheet, because she would rather keep the party in the shaft than kill them in it.
Tactics. Nothing here pursues out of the shaft. The spiders will not cross the last five feet onto either ledge, ever, and the party should be allowed to notice that.
Bypass Options
Thirty feet of taut web in three ten-foot spans.
- Per span: Acrobatics DC 14 to go light-footed, or Athletics DC 15 to go fast and heavy. Anyone roped to a crosser who has already made it rolls with advantage.
- Failure: not a fall. One pluck, and you are still on the web.
- Cost of armour: heavy armour is disadvantage unless the wearer is hauled across on a line by two people, which takes an extra span's worth of time and is worth it.
- Cost of going first: whoever leads is out on the sheet alone with two plucks' worth of margin.
She spoke first. That is not a trap; it is manners, and she has not had a conversation in nineteen years.
- The approach: Persuasion DC 14 to be a guest, or Deception DC 16 to be something more interesting than you are. Anyone who simply answers her question honestly and by name gets advantage.
- Success: she holds the sheet steady, calls the spiders off, and the crossing is free of checks. She talks the whole way across. She is good company.
- Her price: news from outside, and one name. She asks for the name of somebody the speaker loves, and she will remember it, and she will use it if she ever needs to. Handing it over is free and it should not feel free.
- Failure: she goes quiet, which is worse than being shouted at. One pluck, and the next check to cross is at disadvantage because she has stopped holding the sheet level.
Fast, loud, and effective. This is the panic button and it works.
- Doing it: one slashing attack against a north anchor strand (AC 12, 5 HP), then everyone on the sheet holds on as that quarter drops and swings the whole web west into the shaft wall below the exit ledge. Acrobatics DC 15 to ride it and land on the ledge.
- Success: the whole party is across in one round, before the spiders have come down.
- Failure: you fall 20 ft to the next sheet (2d6, restrained, Escape DC 13) and the party is now split vertically with the fight starting.
- Cost: this is three plucks at once and she will never speak to you again. Take it when the count is already at two.
The entry ledge has a second way off it — exit A, a crawl at the back — and nothing in the shaft will follow a party onto the stone. Withdraw at any point before initiative for the cost of ten minutes, the clue, and the bundle.
Exits
Conditional — one roll on the loot table, from the wrapped bundle 20 ft below the crossing sheet. It is a surveyor, a year dead, with his chain still on him.
- The hard way: climb down through the sheet to reach him. Athletics DC 13 and one guaranteed pluck — the web has to be opened and she feels it.
- The easy way: ask. If the Aunt has been befriended, she cuts it down and lowers it to the ledge, because she has no use for a bundle that has stopped being food. No check, no pluck.
The sinew is not the loot. A Weaver Spider's spinneret bundle, cut from a dead one or given by the Aunt, is twisted sinew of the exact grade X20's bronze bird wants for its spring-tendon. Point at the Resolution; do not roll for it.
Scaling — APL 6 / 12 / 15
| APL | Adjustment |
|---|---|
| 6 | Two Weaver Spiders and no Spinner — the voice from above is an ordinary giant spider's silence, and the pluck count runs to four. All DCs −2 |
| 9 | As written |
| 12 | Six Weaver Spiders, and the Spinner re-spins one sheet per round: on her turn, any 10-ft span of web she can see is repaired or removed. Pluck count runs to two. DCs +1 |
| 15 | As APL 12, plus a second Web-Fey Spinner on the shelf opposite. They talk to each other about the party in a language nobody at the table speaks, and they disagree about what to do. DCs +3, and the shaft gains a lair action on initiative 20: every creature touching web makes a Strength save DC 16 or is dragged 10 ft toward the nearest anchor |
- Pacing: 12–18 minutes. The crossing is three checks; the conversation is whatever the table makes of it. If the party engages with her, let them — this is one of very few rooms in the deck where a monster is pleasant.
- If you are behind schedule, put the pluck count at three and skip straight to the crossing: three Acrobatics checks, one voice from above, done in five minutes.
- If nobody talks to her, that is a legitimate way to play the room and the crossing still works. Do not force the conversation; just make sure she speaks first, out loud, in a normal voice, so the party knows the option existed.
- She is an aunt, not a mother. Play her as somebody's relative: mildly interested, faintly disappointed, entirely capable of killing you and not currently minded to. She has nieces in the deep dark and she mentions them.
- Table safety. Restraint, being wrapped, and being hauled somewhere against your will are the room's whole texture. Flag
grapple-dragbefore you start. If webs and wrapping are a hard no at your table, the shaft can be strung with rope and sailcloth by a scavenger crew and the Aunt can be their matriarch, with every DC unchanged. - Clue drip. Two hooks: the surveyor's chain trailing out of the bundle, which is a measuring instrument and therefore X14's exact currency, and what the Aunt knows — she has watched this shaft for nineteen years and she will answer one honest question about the maze for one honest answer about the outside (X10, X06, X11). She has seen who walks past. She remembers the girl with the spool.
- Callback. Arachne's Weave restrains and withdraws; nothing in the warband stands and trades hits. If your table meets them again, the lesson from this room should be that the web is terrain first and a monster second.
Creature Cards
Both belong to Arachne's Weave (W12) and recur across the deck, so the numbers live in the bestiary. The tactics above are this room's and stay here.
Shared across rooms, so the full cards live in the bestiary: Weaver Spider, Web-Fey Spinner. Every mention above opens the numbers here on this page.