Maven

Spirit Guide / Druid

Submitted character story

(Go easy on her artwork, this time I did them while playing and as simplistic, speed sketchs. 😅)

An odd looking specimen of a young lady. Over top her pale, almost gray skin she is adorned with what looks to be a formal, delicate, intricately-patterned veil and dress of charcoal grays and accents of drab purple of the sort one might typically see upon a woman of high social standing. A full head shorter than the typical height of an adult female, her deep, purple eyes are forced to look up through the raven-black bangs of her lightly disheveled, upper back-length hair.



The spider woman-err…*mother* is not quite exactly what you expected to find in the woods. In fact, the lot of you were readying for the fight you *did* expect when the large spiders emerged and struck at the gnolls you’d been struggling against…until she came out to ask you for help.

…Now you find yourself happily dangling a goblin over a swarm of them and you can’t help but think about how you never would have expected yourself to be doing this ever in your life either. But now you’re apparently friends with a spider. Strange how things turn out…



Maven is what’s known as a ‘spirit guide’, a creature born of a high concentration of a particular animal type under the influence of fey magic. In Maven’s case, she is a greater fey spirit that lives within a spider grove that exists both within the feywilds and the material plane, serving as a passage between worlds. 



Maven’s story arc is very simple because her story itself is very simple: The main plot of the campaign-or a character involved within it-has disturbed her grove somehow and she means to rebuild and make sure they cannot threaten it again. They might have burned the material plane side of the grove, severing the connection back to her home in the feywilds or some other similar complication. Regardless, Maven’s priority is the health and safety of spiders everywhere and many of them call her grove home. The lower her starting level is at the start, the more devastating her circumstance should be portrayed as.

Maven may be of the druid class but this, along with the dhampir race she is, is more-or-less a simple reskin to properly represent her abilities as a spider creature of the fey. Her spells, though focusing on the summoning of spiders as her primary means of combat, has a number that, when combined with her abilities at the proper level, allow her to climb surfaces, rapidly spin large webs, trap and feed off of creatures, speak with her children and use them as scouts, and create proper spiderholes for herself (and the party if they like) to sleep in.

She may also take on the form of either a number of small spiders or a single large one, the size of which is heavily dependent upon her current power (represented by her level).
Canonically, like a dragon, her human appearance is not her real form. The real form she takes within the feywild when her strength is full is that of a massive, ‘Shelob’-sized spider. 
Ideally, a DM will allow me the opportunity to cooperate with them to engage with my vision while making sure it aligns with game balance and, through it, I might be able to arrange excuses for gameplay aspects, like ‘changing last second to a human to escape real harm’ when dropped to 0 HP as a spider, or perhaps the concession to allow her fully downed form to be that of a spider. 

At night, if level and spell slots permit, Maven burrow herself a spider hole and use (DM willing) a third party spell to fill the hole with sheltering web that allows her to sense when it is disturbed. If the party wishes to take advantage of this shelter, there is enough room for everyone in her humanoid form. If she is alone inside though, she will sleep in her natural form and emerge as such when her nest is disturbed.

When ‘summoning’ her children, they either come from the surrounding area-if appropriate-or out from within her dress. This may or may not be a self-limited use of the spell this ‘ability’ is born from if I cannot excuse the sudden appearance of, say, a CR1 giant spider from the area she is in.

While she was born through a massive congregation of spiders, she is intended to act like a mother toward all of the ones she encounters in her travels. If this breaks spider-themed encounters that the DM sets up and really wants to run, more complications can be arranged for her, though she will never kill her ‘children’ or stand for their deaths.

She is very soft-spoken with a monotone voice, showing very little emotion. A natural kuudere. (...I think. tbh, I had to look up what the archetype is called.)

(https://open.spotify.com/track/7C2eI5UXG5KPqjHSGDR44l?si=FP2KB7cjRv-kof0NC68r4g)


As I grew into adulthood and many of the fears or discomforts I had became more malleable, I found my love of animals entirely take over my fear of the typical…usual suspects in bugs, particularly spiders, which I maintain are just animals in scary-looking costumes. I even shockingly discovered tarantulas too can be cute when you find one in a weapon clearing station in Arizona and make it your MOS schooling class pet. 🙃 They just crawl forward on your hands like a hamster. Pretty cute when they’re like that and aren’t scurrying across the floor under the barracks duty desk at 3am when you’re half-asleep and scaring the absolute entire p*ss out of you.

I came up with the idea for Maven after…honestly, I don’t know what made me think of it, but I thought about the spider queen from Undertale and thought about a creature that wasn’t a queen but a creature that truly loved every spider as a mother. A ‘mother of all spiders’. I think she might have even been my first character to be of the ‘Spirit Guide’ concept, though it wasn’t until somewhat recently that I finally coined a term for what they are.

Though she may or may not (though likely not) show up in my novel I am writing to preserve my better characters, she has her own children’s book I wrote in the late nights of the two weeks following the birth of my twins late last year as I took my shift to watching over them from my wife.

I should be illustrating it now but I’ve lately been finding other things to work on and entertain myself with every day. i WoNdEr WhAt ThAt CoUlD bE, *JAN*…you enabler 😏.


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>The oxen calf has a cow,
The piglet has a sow,
But it leaves me wondering when…

The chick has a hen
And I question so then,
What kind of mother is there for a spider?

Horsey colt has a mare
A jill is for the hare
Though yet I question so?

The fawn has a doe
But then who is to know
What kind of mother is there for a spider?


>Not in palace, not in barn,
Not in fields on the farm.
I searched in homes and downtown streets

Not meadow glade fare
But in a forest grove where
I found there the mother of spiders.

She was pale and fair
And she was black-of-hair
In silken gown was she

Her body, frail and short
But of the feminine sort
Was this the mother of spiders?

With her darkened eyes
And, to my surprise,
A pair of fangs tucked in corners of her mouth.

For goodness sake,
There could be no mistake
This was the mother of spiders.


>She spoke of her days
And in the many ways
The mother she had to be.

Spun webs all day
To catch sizeable prey
Ensuring a meal for her spiders.

If intruders meant harm
She’d sound the alarm
And clear the way for her young.

But woe to those
Who mean to oppose
A mother in defense of her spiders.


>It sounded to me such
And I’d said just as much
Familiar was the motherly spider.

I understood why,
“You sound a lot,” said I
“Like my own dear mother who raised me.”

“Just because,” She said,
“The sweat a mother must shed
Is the same for more than just spiders.”


>But back all the same
To when I asked for her name
So that I may write who the spiders called ‘mom’.

“They call me,” said she,
“My children-you see,
Maven, The Mother of Spiders.”


>I write this book
For the mothers that look
After us all both big and little.

Even if we were small
We still remember all
To keep us both safe and loved.

So never forget
All the effort she’s spent
To take care of your feelings and wants

There is no other,
So make certain you hug her
For she’ll always be the one to love you.

-Excerpts from ‘The Mother of Spiders’

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