Velithra Web-Sunder - The Drider

Role in Its Society:

Velithra Web-Sunder is a living reminder of Lolth’s cruelty—a cursed drider who has turned exile into empire in a stretch of Underdark tunnels now known as the Sundered Web.

Once a respected drow huntmistress, Velithra was transformed into a drider for perceived failure—cast from the obsidian spires into the dark to die as a monster. Instead, she survived. Now she rules the forgotten shafts, side-tunnels, and abandoned shrines that lie between drow holdings and the deeper wilds.

To the drow, she’s an embarrassing blasphemy: a failed daughter who somehow thrives despite the Spider Queen’s curse. To outcasts, escaped slaves, and lost wanderers, she’s a dangerous patron who might grant passage, sanctuary, or vengeance—for a price.

Velithra’s web network:

• Snags patrols, scouts, and lone monsters as a food source and bargaining chip.
• Serves as an information net, with stolen banners, holy symbols, and carved signs woven into key junctions.
• Creates unofficial “toll roads” through her territory—threads marked in a particular pattern that only those who’ve bargained with her can recognize.

She is both denizen and overlord—shunned by the cities above, but powerful enough that some drow houses secretly hire her to sabotage rivals or intercept key prisoners.

Appearance Description:

Velithra’s body melds the upper torso of a lithe drow woman with the massive, chitinous form of a monstrous spider.

Her drow half retains the severe beauty of her former station: sharp cheekbones, angular jaw, and long white hair braided into tight, practical cords threaded with tiny spider charms and stolen house insignias. Her skin is obsidian-dark, faintly patterned with thin, silvery tracery that echoes web threads. Her crimson eyes burn with a cold, bitter intelligence.

From the waist down, her body fans into a gleaming black spider abdomen and eight segmented legs. The chitin is matte in most places but glossy along the edges where it’s been polished by stone and webs. Several old scars—jagged and pale—cross her shell, souvenirs of drow hunters, umber hulks, and failed assassins.

Her upper body is lightly adorned: a harness of dark leather and studded straps that secure daggers, vials, and silk spools; a warped, ceremonial breastplate taken from a priestess she devoured, refitted to her altered form. Long fingers end in razor-sharp nails, often stained with poison or ink.

She moves with eerie grace: sometimes clacking across walls and ceilings, sometimes hanging upside down from her webs, her upper body perfectly still while her spider legs twitch and reposition. When angered, her abdomen rises and her legs spread wide, making her fill the tunnel like a barbed gate.

Backstory:

Velithra once served as a huntmistress and scout-captain for a mid-tier drow house. Her specialty was navigating the shifting border between city territory and wild Underdark, mapping new routes, and ensuring raiding parties returned with prisoners and plunder.

In one infamous campaign, she led a strike into a rival house’s holdings. The ambush went catastrophically wrong: an unexpected purple worm, sabotaged routes, or a rival priestess’s treachery (stories differ) left half her unit dead and the rest scattered. Velithra returned with scars, survivors, and an explanation that displeased Lolth’s priestesses.

They needed a scapegoat. Lolth needed a lesson.

Velithra was dragged before the altar, judged wanting, and transformed into a drider—a living symbol of failure and divine displeasure. Cast into the deep tunnels, she should have become just another monster.

Instead, her training and spite kept her alive.

• She mapped every shaft and side-passage she fell through.
• She used her new spider-climbing and webbing to set ambushes, reclaiming gear and knowledge from anyone who blundered into her lair.
• She began collecting trophies—not just for food, but as signposts: a priestess’s holy symbol marking a safe path, a duergar crest dangling where she’d razed a patrol.

Word of a “drider queen” in the Sundered Web spread. Outcasts, escaped slaves, and dispossessed warriors approached her as a last resort. Some became allies. Most became food. Drow houses occasionally whisper deals through intermediaries—never acknowledging, publicly, that they rely on the cursed one in the dark.

Velithra burns with complicated hatred: for Lolth, for the priestesses who sentenced her, and for the weakness she sees in anyone too afraid to live without a city’s walls. She has become exactly what they fear: a clever, organized monster who does not need them anymore.