Drider Encounter - Playing With Your Food


Advice


I'm laying out a dungeon crawl for my players in a remote cave, long forgotten. No intelligent life has entered for decades. There is a single Drider whose lived here for quite some time, and is more lonely than vicious. She's used to eating giant centipedes and other vermin, which don't make for good conversation. Once the group is deep enough into her lair, she will show herself, and plead them to entertain her, and in exchange, she will resist her hunger for as long as she can. The APL is 3rd.

In short, this is intended to be a social encounter with a time limit. I have several exits prepared for the PCs to discover during this encounter, which will trigger the "combat" portion, but I'm here today to ask for ideas for the social portion. Maybe the Drider wants to play a game, maybe it wants to hear some stories. Does anyone have any ideas to expand on this? Any specific games that the players could roleplay without it being a simple skill check?


Riddles in the dark?


Stories with shadow puppets might blow her mind.


Riddles in the Dark sounds like a wonderful idea, except that PF has given everybody darkvision and spammable light cantrips, because torches and lanterns were just too hard to keep track of.

That said... magical darkness that negates darkvision and light sources? Why not? Keep it in just one area, but have that area be complex -- turns and doors and strange terrain -- so that it's not easy to escape. Then you can start the conversation in the dark.

Note that the tricky bit here is preventing the PCs from either running away or immediately attacking the drider. (PCs being PCs, they'll really want to do one or the other.) Darkness is actually a pretty elegant way to solve this.

Doug M.


Fortunately, the PCs are escaped slaves, which means they have no gear or components. So no Light spells, and none of them are a Darkvision race. So riddles in the dark is pretty doable.

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