The image of a massive swarm of spiders lead by a spiderman shepherd as a threat to a biome or the feywild is a fun set piece, but I am also incredibly interested how a village or a clan of ettercaps might look like. Cause they have 7 intellegence which is comparable to your traditional orc, but their lore really doesn't say much about how they interact with others of their kind, neither calling them loners nor cooperative.

"No one speaks Scottish" My ass over here learning Gaelic: "hey...yeah that's true."

I used Ettercaps as noble forest guardians in my campaign who were Shepards to big cow spiders.

Fun fact: there is a magical spider from 3.5e that spins fire-proof blood webs. So if you wanna make the encounter 10x scarier and more challenging, there ya go.

something that i think goes underappreciated about ettercaps is the way their illustrations from earlier editions made them *not* look like spiders. they were spiderpeople who weren't literally spiders themselves, and i thought that was really interesting.

In this case, just let the Wizard cast all the Fireballs they want…

That spooderman in the thumbnail takes me back man. Simpler times of batshit insane internet humor.

fuck yea. I love ettercaps, such an interesting take on a spider person. I also love that they can be threatening, but they could also just be chill dudes, maybe even an ally to the party

Honestly this guy could totally be made into a pc, like a Druid that has just a mobile spider army

That’s a wild amount of flavour for something so low on the monster totem pole, I love it

My favorite trap to make out of webs is the Chinese finger trap, the more the players try to escape the tighter it gets and if they go into it it lets them go. Edit: make it person sized obviously

I use these boys all the time as a low level threat! A great way to have nature get warped, blight a village, and explain why there are giant insects and strange traps!

The Garotte is really cool and makes them sort of unique as am onster as it uses the rarely-seen suffocation rules. If they can keep your character choked out for a number of rounds equal to your CON mod, you just fall to 0 HP and are dying instantly, and can't be stabilized until they stop choking you. I rand what was supposed to be a moderate encounter but it ended up being very nbearly lethal because the Ettercaps were using this ability to choke PCs who got webbed by the actual spiders.

What's also interesting about Ettercaps is their origin story. They were apparently a circle of druids that specialized in spider forms. They were once human, but stayed in beast mode so much that they started to "go native." After becoming evil cannibals, they were cursed to essentially be stuck in a half-human, half-insectoid form forever, and thus became Ettercaps.

That's a terrifying creature especially for only a challenge rating of two.

In my setting there is an Ettercap Druid who has reverse-engineered the ritual the Drow invented to make Chitines. And since their entire goal is to make a lot of spider stuff, they just keep making progressively more dangerous spider men.

I got excited for a second hoping for Anadi. I love me some adorable jumping spider people

Had one in a campaign but I changed it up. Made it so as a bonus action after catching a creature or object in the web, it could shoot out another web and yoink it up to 30 ft to itself

So, the problem with Ettercaps is that you could design an awesome forest dungeon based around one that would be a challenge even for a relatively high leveled party, but the final boss would be an Ettercap, which the party would wipe the floor with, even if they weren't in great condition due to fighting their way through all of its horrors.

i could see an ettercap in as silk suit and top had just popin up out of no where at the mere mention of spiders and like a sleazy car salesman just start showing off his spiders like an infomercial "Spiders. ohhh yeaa i got spiders, Big ones little ones fuzzy ones bald ones poisonous ones and cure ones you just wanna hug, gowan take a look they wont try to eat ya. long as you don't look tasty that is "

Yes! One of my favorite monsters ever! Combine with different types of fungus, assassin vines and some poison on iron barred doors. Use tripwires and stuff in combinations with alchemy items from previously eaten adventurers.

One idea I had for my setting is a home brew monster called the fay slayer spider (Working title.) It's sort of like the blink dog and displacer beast that it's a monstrosity that originates from the fay wild. Any way these things as the title suggests love to feed on fey creatures and they have two unique tools to do so. 1 they have true sight that can see through all illusion ( the eyed can be harvested and made into a potion) and their webs cannot be detected by any form of magic. The spiders even know how to weave their webs into crude cloaks around themselves to make them undetectable to magic. (Fay Slayer Silk Cloaks are a very rare item.) There's a major faction in my setting called the Anti Mage Movement (AMM) who'll pay the party good money for Fay Slayer silk, or even a live spider.

I made Lurkwood into one of the major stops in my homebrew campaign and I didn't use ettercaps yet, there is definitely a dark elf influenced spider infestation spreading from the feywild. The spiders use a poison I dubbed "Heartstake" It's a poison which doesn't do much (or any) damage up front, but aside of poisoning you, it stacks. First giving you extra movement speed, then in one or two steps the effects of haste. But when it expires or when you finally succeed on the saving throw (or when the poison gets removed, optionally) you roll to not get paralyzed from the muscle muscle spasms and the damage might kill you as again, it stacks. The stonger the spider the higher the DC and the more stacks it gives. Oh right and there is a tribe of enthralled goblins that are hooked up on the spider venom (or it's refined drug variants). Sometimes they even keep spiders on their bodies to they can get high on their bites. Right, almost forgot. I make fire troublesome by making the smoke from the burning webs toxic as well.

You know how farmers hate insects, slugs, rabbits, and things that eat plants? And how like 60% of all farming technology is keeping the things that like to eat crops from eating the crops? I could totally see a farmer hiring an ettercap to do like a bi-weekly cropdusting to kill anything not-plant in the fields. Hell, I could imagine a kingdom having a royal stable/guild/whatever of ettercaps to help keep their farms running well.

I once (about 2010) ran a game where the first thing that almost wiped out the party was a pair of ettercaps and their crawlies. Good times!

i ran into one of these once with a group in a campaign i was in intensive dwarfen brewing and our own clothes are the only reason we survived. half of us were naked and a significant chunk of forest were gone by the time that incident was resolved

Me: Not everything needs to be resolved with fireball, you know, there's a lot of cool magic that exists and... Also me when I find a Ettercap lair: NOPE NOPE NOPE FIREBALL FIREBALL FIREBALL

These guys would make such a great first encouter kinda situation. I've never DM'd before and just got the curse of strahd book

had one of these in a forest cave in a campaign, hanging skeletons encased in webs on the ceiling really added to the mood, and to stop the burning i removed the floor, the webs were the only thing they had to stand on (unless they wanted a large fall)

I love these videos where it's basically like optimizing but for a DM

By the way, I love the sudden silence when the spiders turned towards those adventurers

Shepherd of monsters is always was interesnting idea for me, but that dude is really scary. Especially becouse of diet on fairies.

You said you some smaller creatures that were threatening, and that made me remember this idea I've had rattling around in my head. Just as a warning I am not a DM just sporadically creative. Feel free to expand on it. All I ask for is a bit of credit. Fruit Spiders: A spider that sleeps in a fruit shaped and colored cocoon until disturbed. About the size of an orange. Not very strong, but uses great numbers to overwhelm opponents. Hangs cocoons from a tree and camouflages them to look like fruit from said tree. Most commonly round fruit with rare exceptions. Sometimes forms a symbiotic relationship with a sentient tree in which the tree creates the fruit, the spiders defend the tree, and the tree hides and consumes whatever is left of the victims.

I love using ettercaps! Fill cocoons with spiders and webbing, and float them onto flying players with web parashoots! Reskin evil druids as an ettercap matriarch and cover them in spiders like living armor!

I like the idea of an ettercap who isn't necessarily evil, just his whole biome is so dangerous that it doesn't matter, and if he encounters the party he acts like he is defending himself from evil raiders

It would be fun to write a D&D setting where basically a critical lack of adventurers let all the different monsterous creatures terraform the world into a shithole. I will definitely be putting a LOT of Ettercap forests into such a place. Will be a fun time.

I never fully appreciated these weird little guys. Thank you for opening my eyes

These would be a good setup to leave a starting area in a campaign. Clearing out the sticky webs for merchants to travel or to escort a merchant wagon out of a small town, etc

My most recent D&D game had an encounter with an Ettercap. The party was on a diplomatic mission to speak with the local forest elves. After a short encounter with two twig blights, we got approached by three sprites begging us to help their friend (who turned out the be a dryad). In hindsight, the Ettercap must not have been there for very long as their entourage was small and the amount of webs was light. But we saved the day and the lives of the dryad and three elves. It helped us on our mission and the grateful dryad rewarded us with some loot. It was a lot of fun!

They could have a way to add humidity to the environment in some weird way, or just set up in wet areas so that the webs can’t burn.

Literally sitting down to work out the Ettercap lair for an early adventure in my Hexcrawl and what to my wondering eyes doth appear! Great stuff as always my dude :)

Now I imagine Eberron game in Sharn, where there's your friendly neighborhood driderman/ettercapman and an angry fairy journalist. Also, when I rand rogues stand-alone one shot, he got a fight with these baddies, in alliance with two dryads and a pixie. Pixie turned him into a t-rex and called it a day.

I have an entire diverse catalogue of playable insectoids because I believe there is a distinct lack of this in DnD as a whole, and I really like bugs. I have never heard of these, and I'm now happy you've brought them to my attention. Thank you.

Ettercap just released 1000 species of invasive spiders into the everglades

Artillerists artificers get a basically infinite use flame thrower at level 3. Sounds like an easy win.

Honestly ive always loved these guys, would love to run one someday. They could even be a patron for a more evil (or at least morally lenient) party

The far side of the Ettercaps domain is Black Dragon territory with a usurper Necromancer for flavor.

personally im fine with a "boss" or just antagonistic force like this just being not very tough themselves. In this case the goal would be finding the Ettercap rather then the danger of fighting it, I think in the past i've made the mistake of making every antagonistic being a worthy opponent for the party but i've grown to realize that there are certainly times when its okay for the boss at the end of a encounter or whatever to be much weaker. after all it means you can spend more time fleshing out the Journey and a little less time trying to make a strong monster

Actually, fire _wouldn't_ be great for this. I crested a spider bossfight for a oneshot a little time back (including a fey shadowspider of my own creation that became invisible in darkness and could walk through walls) and I needed to find a way to prevent my players from just putting a torch to the webs and call it a day. You know, besides the hostage. But it turned out I didn't need to invent a reason, because spider silk isn't flamable. Yeah a good fire will probably destroy it, but it won't feed one. Add to that that that the entire area is dank, and no forest fires for you.

I had an idea, giving ettercaps xenomorph Eggs.

Ah yes the one single use for that bit of lore where druids only use wooden weapons. Good luck using fireball when all the enchanted loot is flammable!

awesome vid thanks for the encounter inspo

3:23 I hate you for uncovering the trauma that is the troll movie.

I sent my wife's character up against an ettercap and his Colony that had taken over a Vineyard. Her character through a ring of animal friendship talks to every animal she meets and I kind of freaked her out with the whole kind of don't hurt Papa mentality that the spiders had dealing with the ettercap down in The Wine Cellar

I put my party against an ettercap led spider ambush, and it was the deadliest thing at that point in the campaign. For context, these guys just beat a WHITE DRAGON the encounter before.

Apparently they are descendants of druids who wild shaped into spiders so often that they loved it and kept doing spider things even when not a wild shaped spider. Somehow that leads to curse or corruption into man spiders.

'Dorable Fellas~

One can use Tasha's Cauldron of Everything and it's ideas for an infested environment along with the ideas for traps from the Dungeon Master's Guide.

was just about to run an underdark campaign. thanks for the inspiration!

I love the idea of Ettercaps kidnapping a couple dozen children only to feed and take care of them so they can use them as hostages to get what they want. If the villagers leave the Ettercaps alone, the children are taken care of an spared then released once they are traumatized adults and they keep doing this to ensure they survive, then once they cannot have a reliable shipment of kiddies or whatever they send in the whole swarm to just wipe out a settlement.

Everybody gangsta until the friendly neighborhood cleric of loth or drow druid befriends some ettercaps.

I used these guys for a mini arc in my game recently! Partyoved it and got some good encounters out of them

One this video created so much in my head Thank you very much, Lettercraftsmen, do do more

My partner put ettercaps into a campaign they ran a few years ago and, due to the campaign taking place in an archfey-created demiplane, they were a bit weird. Like I'm talking they ran insurance companies weird. And the ettercaps still bred spiders and weren't HELPFUL (y'know like 99 percent of insurance companies!), but they weren't hostile. Don't remember the details because I sadly wasn't part of that campaign, but the image one of the players for that campaign made featuring a 5e ettercap with a State Farm baseball cap photoshopped onto it will forever be in my brain.

I don’t often put a like on a video, but when someone references King Ramses (the man in gauze! The man in gauze!) in a relevant way, I like and subscribe.

I can’t wait to use all of these when I find friends who aren’t fed up with my shit as a dm

The casual nature in which you dropped "testicular torsion" makes me think you're a Venture fan. This thought gives me the happys.

Etter 47 disguised as a nobleman's captured daughter ganks you in the woods. Now that's how you gain dm infamy.

Ettercap assassins is where it is at for stories/encounters

The Guy with the slab 🤣🤣🤣 love it!

I love how timeless spore is, good to see its not forgotten

Don’t forget to throw in the Infested Zone from TCoE

one of my players is a fey, who is just trying to get home...this is a good "end of story" quest to get her home

Top tier comedy in this one. Good work as always.

Dear smith of runes im here to enquirer about your opinion on the dingo doodles trausqque minifigure specifically if its safer as a doorstop or a garden gnome

I’ve realized that this is just National Geographic for fantasy animals

Could you do Locathahs? I just when pescatarian and need motivation.

Ettercaps appear in the first Baldur's Gate.

the Spore reference! you are amazing runesmith

So when we first started up our current 5e adventures, one of our first big encounters we were set up against was an Ettercap who had set up in a seaside cave next to a forest a pixie called home, and the result was it's spidey minions were starting to stretch from the cave to the forest and doing the usual old ettercap things. Among our party, I had the crazy dumb idea upon seeing a cave almost literally coated with spiderwebs of striking up a torch and seeing if I could maybe give them a little singe. To say I apparently rolled pretty good was an understatement. There was a literal backblast as the web coating flash-burned and scorched the cave interior. A few of the larger spiders survived, as did the Ettercap, but I was told I wound up cutting a few swarms out of the encounter that way.

4:45 that's definitely Snakes and Ladders

I cannot deny my children fresh meat when it wanders so willingly into our midst. Goodbye, "friends of Hagrid's"

Wow, a Troll 2 clip. Also ettercaps are an awesome antagonist.

I've always wanted to run one (or more) of these, but the number of adds you'd have to put in the map sounds like a DM nightmare >.

The ettercap design and art from Neverwinter Nights is my favorite version.

I think the easiest way to dissuade liberal use of fire in this situation is to simply point out to the players that they are in fact in the very flammable forest

They’re just funky little guys. I like em

When you fire the local red dragon to kill spiders. No lie though I died after my favorite AD&D encounter after taking 1 point of damage from a spider bite.... followed 15 minutes later by 15 poison damage

Like the old lore about some Druids that where a little to Spider Friendly.

Now I understand why J. R. R. Tolkien wrote Bilbo Baggins calling all the spiders in the forest "Attercops". It's a "ye olde" version of Ettercaps.

I have a homebrew player race of drider-like spiderpeople. I wonder how an ettercap would interact with them.

honestly if players used fire, unless they dealt with the spread of fire, i would have them face real repercussions for burning a section of forest. like. that would lead to a full forest fire, who knows, fey coming after them, druids, conservationists

Ah Ettercaps.. the very first monster I used in my monster hunting campaign

I was really excited to see a new video from you despite really hating Ettercaps. That's how much I love your content.

Finally some love for Ettercaps

I own most ghostfire games products, however i want to point out one thing, dungeons of drakkenheim is Mordeheim in dnd, i dont know if the original writer was brought back for it but its literally mordeheim

F@cking Spooderman Got Dayum

A PC version of this might be nice, wouldn't be the first time we'd have playable monsters.

Awesome content bro would love more monster tactics videos

Ah yes. Spider-people, weakness to fire and upon sight of them will cause even the most un-intelligible feral creatures of D&D to learn how to cast any fire spell just to kill one of these spider-persons.