Lion's Tactical Guide to the Sword Spider

Sword spiders are giant arachnids that live in forests and caves, locating their prey via tremorsense and tearing them apart with their two serrated sword-like front legs. They’re very similar to giant spiders, although they have greater hit points and slightly higher ability scores almost entirely across the board, with the exception of their incredibly low Charisma. They possess the same climbing speed and passive traits of giant spiders along with their potentially paralytic Bite attack, but they exchange the ability to fire off restraining webs on a recharge for a Multiattack which adds two Foreleg attacks on top of their Bite for an average of 10 slashing damage per Foreleg attack. Fortunately for me, the flavor text does a decent job of describing their tactics already: they hang up on tree branches or cavern walls to ambush their prey using their Stealth proficiency, then focus all of their attacks on a single target, going with the Foreleg attacks first to pull them in before using Bite to hopefully leave them at 0 hit points and paralyzed. As soon as the sword spider has their prey paralyzed, they immediately move to pick them up and drag them up a tree or cavern wall in order to get out of reach of any pesky allies trying to rescue them. Of course, like Mr. Ammann often says, predators don’t like prey that fights back, and their Wisdom is high enough to recognize that they oughta skedaddle up the wall with or without food as soon as they’re reduced to 18 hit points or less.

Deep spiders are a larger, stronger variety of sword spiders that came about when drow-DROWW worshippers of Lolth brought regular sword spiders into the Underdark and began breeding them for use in battle. Although many of them have escaped their custody and may be Encountered Hunting On Their Own, it is equally likely that your players will find them acting almost as a spidery war elephant for a force of drow warriors or as a beloved pet for a drow arachnomancer. They have much greater hit points due to their larger size along with much greater Strength and slightly better Constitution at the cost of slightly lower Dexterity, resulting in them having one less AC than their smaller counterparts. Their Bite attack is stronger and harder to resist, while their Foreleg attacks are almost twice as strong, but since they don’t gain any additional attacks, they hunt their prey in the exact same manner unless they are being commanded to do otherwise by a drow handler. When encountered in the wild, deep/D.S. spiders will flee as soon as they are reduced to 38 hit points or less, and given how many of them have broken free from captivity, I would argue that nothing short of mind control will prevent them from doing so even while being used as a war beast or companion by a drow master. 

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