Inferno spiders are deadly predators native to the Plane of Fire. These elemental arachnids are composed of living magma encased in a semi-cooled basalt shell with long, spindly legs. Liquid fire drips from their vicious fangs, and their eight eyes burn like hot coals. Building burning webs or skimming across the molten landscape like gigantic water striders, inferno spiders are apex predators feared by the plane’s weaker natives.
Inferno spiders possess near-human intelligence and seek out powerful masters to serve, increasing their chances of survival. They swarm by the thousands in the Auroric Palace of Ymeri, the Elemental Lady of Fire. Many have emigrated to the Abyss to serve Flauros, the demon lord of fire and volcanoes. In the absence of a divine patron, inferno spiders are content to serve high-level clerics, druids, and mages with an affinity to fire.
Although as outsiders inferno spiders do not require food to survive, they nonetheless feel a constant hunger to stoke their internal fires. Inferno spiders can survive indefinitely without food, but they become increasingly feral and maddened the longer they go without eating.
Inferno spiders can live forever if not killed, growing ever larger, but after several decades they begin to feel the need to mate. Inferno spiders are neither male nor female, and reproduce in a singularly strange fashion: two courting inferno spiders fall into a ritualistic dance in which they circle each other for days, their legs intertwined as they feel each other out. At the end of the ritual, they charge each other, whereupon they collide and explode, giving birth to hundreds of tiny young. Newborn inferno spiders are highly vulnerable and are eaten voraciously by other predators (and each other), but enough always survive to adulthood.
Inferno spiders cluster near Hinnva’s Cage on the Plane of Fire, and the wicked god is known to send them to his more powerful cultists in order to reinforce their schemes.
Shores of Swords 