vigilantsycamore asked:

You've done a few Monsters Reimagined posts about gods already, so I was wondering... any ideas for reimagining Lolth? I know in your Drow post you suggested just ditching the spider cultist stuff, but I do think Lolth herself has some potential. (I have some ideas of my own, which can be summed up as "to high elves, Lolth IS an evil trickster, but to Drow she's the goddess of law, art, magic, and anything to do with webs, and CORELLON is the trickster" but I'm curious what ideas you have)

dailyadventureprompts answered:

Deity: Lolth, Queen of Spiders and Weaver of Lies

Its said that in the dawn era when the world was still settling the first mortals caught one of their gods in a lie. It was a benign, harmless thing, but that first falsehood turned sour in the god’s mouth, and when spitting to earth it took a shape with many legs, and scuttled off into the dark

Setup: None can say where Lolth or her cult first emerged, as a goddess of deception she has worn many guises and worked to obscure her true origin since perhaps the first moment of her existence. even her commonly recorded name; Lolth, is but the most recent of her aspects, one that many scholars believe she has abandoned in recent ages as more and more of her followers awake to the cruelty of her doctrine, leaving behind a hollow idol the way a spider sheds its carapace when it grows. 

Lolth is a goddess of deception, not the simple half truths that everyone lets slip now and again (though some more orthodox faiths claim that these lies give life to spiders), but to the falsehoods that warp the perception of individuals, communities, and entire nations: they are out to get you/ I didn’t push you, you fell/ our way is the godly way, all others are degenerate. When one of these delusions takes root and begins to skew lives, the goddess weaves another thread into her tapestry of deception, wrapping her victims in a false reality the way a spider wraps its prey. Lolth too is an enemy of objective reality, sowing madness in the minds of mortals or using her agents to muddle and destroy historical records.

Logically it doesn’t make sense to worship a goddess of deception, nightmares and gaslighting, until one asks who might benefit from others falling prey to such afflictions. Tyrants, abusers, con artists, the ones that think they’re clever enough to lie forever or the ones so prideful they believe that their opinions override reality. These are the ones that feel the tug of the spider’s string, and delude themselves into thinking they are puppeteer rather than puppet.

Adventure Hooks

• After the death of their high priestess, a cult of darkelves found their connection to the spiderqueen severed, throwing them into a theological crisis that left most of their leadership dead as each tried to backstab their way into proving that they were Lolths next chosen.  Faced with a total lack of guidance, the cults lesser acolytes and henchmen have taken to following the last survivor off this divinely ordained massacre:  A former apprentice of the high priestess who died performing a grand rite and was transformed into a deathlock for her trouble. Kept around as both jester and example of what fate awaits those who waver in their faith, this cackling cadaver has forgotten much of who she was and now calls herself Hollowhead, a cruel nickname given by her mistress when she realized her dead apprentice always had spiders on the brain, literally.   Now tugging at the neck chain that once secured her to the high priestess’s throne, Hollowhead leads the cult out to enact whatever whim her goddess puts in her head, with the features on the menu being sacrifices, rampant poisonings, and gross transfigurations.    
• In one of their many adventures, the party end up clashing with a charming huckster who’s gone and made an enemy of some very powerful people. Perhaps he’s backed a guild leader into a bad business deal, or swindled a fortune out of the party’s prospective patron. Perhaps he introduces himself as a mentor for a young party of roguish individuals and then leaves them holding the bag in the midst of a heist. When he dies (either when the party catches up to him or months later after he’s been justly tried and tossed in a dungeon) he realizes that he’s called  upon the weaver of lies one too many times in the course of filling his pockets, and is at risk of having his soul claimed once it passes into the underworld. To avoid this terrible fate, the huckster pulls one last trick, stealing himself from the goddess’s clutches and wandering the world as a ghost. Never one to be denied her prize, the goddess dispatches a monstrous construct from her realm, a Retriever, to fetch the trickster’s wayward soul and flatten anything that stands in its way: such as the party, who the huckster has been quietly haunting for some time as a means of tagging along with their adventures. 
• On the trail of a missing merchant caravan, the party encounter a village Where Everything Is Fine, with the one exception being the library dedicated to Ioun seems to have been boarded shut. Folk here vaguely remember the merchant passing through, but having come a long while the party decide to rest in the rustic and comfortable inn to enjoy some good food and the owers’ charming hospitality, only to wake up with one of their number missing. Find out their horrifying fate under the cut

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