Spiders, by and large, are solitary creatures. In fact, that lovely cornflower blue illustration notwithstanding, I imagine that a phase spider is indistinguishable from other giant spiders until it begins blinking.īut wait a second. Something created them out of regular giant spiders, and they continue to live side by side with their mundane sisters. Rather, they’re the result of a magical hiccup in the evolutionary process. Why the former ability and not the latter? And why the ability to phase back and forth between planes? Here’s my theory: Phase spiders didn’t evolve independently. So we have an ambush predator that can navigate webs but doesn’t create them. Finally, the combination of Stealth proficiency and darkvision makes phase spiders nighttime or underground ambush predators. It’s not unthinkable that a phase spider might even use tools. Although they’re not clever enough to act beyond their instincts, those instincts can take them a long way: Intelligence 6 is equivalent to that of a chimp. With Intelligence of 6, they’re also cleverer than you’d expect a spider to be. Phase spiders are brute fighters, with high Strength and Dexterity and above-average Constitution. I’m going to take a quick look at its other traits and then come back to these, because I think the phase spider is in need of some flavor text that explains what it’s all about.
Second, they have the Ethereal Jaunt feature, which lets them phase back and forth between the material plane and the ethereal plane. This struck me as so peculiar that I checked the MM errata to confirm that it wasn’t a mistake. First, while they have the Web Walker feature, they don’t spin webs. Phase spiders differ from giant spiders in a variety of minor respects and two significant ones. Why, alongside this menagerie of mundane beasts and their oversize cousins, do we also find awakened trees and shrubs, blink dogs, death dogs, wargs (excuse me, “worgs”) and phase spiders? Why didn’t these monsters (none of them is categorized as a “beast”) rate their own listings in the body of the book? So odd. I’m puzzled as to why certain creatures are included in the “Miscellaneous” Appendix A of the fifth-edition Monster Manual, which consists mostly-but not entirely-of regular animals, such as apes, bears, crocodiles and so forth.
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