#spider drow

(image description: a small and very simple sketch of two spider drow with fangs and pedipalps on their faces, holding their arms tucked against their bodies. they are each reaching out a pedipalp to hold like tiny hands, and there is a small heart above them. One has a braid, the other has a bun. end description.)

(image description: four colored portraits of drow at varying levels of spider. They all have purple skin and white hair.

The first is a standard humanoid drow, basically just being a purple elf.

The second, a humanoid design with spider features, has larger bat-like ears, more facial hair, tiny extra eyes on their forehead, and spider fangs emerging from their mouth.

Third, a more spider like design, has shorter fuzzier hair, facial whiskers, and a carapace style of skin, with thinner ears. there are pedipalps emerging from their jaw and bigger spider fangs in their mouth over a cleft chin. Their eyes are a solid red with smaller eyes around them. Red and blue markings stripe their face and shoulders.

Finally, an extra spidery design with much shorter fuzzy hair and stiff pointy ears. They have longer facial whiskers and a split jaw with much bigger spider fangs and pedipalps that sit closer to the mouth. Their central eyes are big, round, and glowing red, with six tiny eyes surrounding them. They also have more red and blue patterns on their carapace.

The first two designs have normal noses, the last two only have small nasal holes. end description.)

I was thinking of making majority of the torso the "endgame result" of their ancestral progenitor's abdomen and the chest part of the torso, head and neck to clavicle the "endgame result" of their ancestral progenitor's cephalothorax. And keeping the pedipalps as a sort of "face hands" situation that helps keep solid foods from falling out of their mouth during chewing.

Do you think having the the last pair of spider legs vestigials being located on the very start/top part of the hips is reasonable or should i put it elsewhere?

(image description: two pages of simple digital sketches showing drow with spider features, including some studies of spider and primate anatomy. In the first page, there are a few color coded spider studies, where the upper body segment is orange, the lower body segment is pink, and the legs are green. Additionally, the fangs are bright blue and the pedipalps are dark blue. Two simple outlines of a monkey and human skeleton have been drawn in comparison. The legs all emerge from the underside of the upper body segment.

Below all that, a bipedal spider drow has also been drawn with the same color coding as the spider studies. They have been drawn extremely spider-like. they have thick lower legs, two pairs of small vestigial legs, and more dextrous upper legs used as arms. The head is a little more separated from the torso and the pedipalps emerge from the neck. The lower body segment is roughly equal in size to the upper body segment.

On the second page, there are more spider drow sketches that retain more features of a typical drow. One is basically a normal humanoid drow with small spider legs on their torso as well as spider fangs and small extra eyes. the other sketches show similar body types to the extra spidery drow design, but they also have large ears and more human-like hair. end description.)

So, to keep it simple;

Elves in my world are evolved from humans (or, a common ancestor with humans, undecided) stepping into the Feywild and being affected by wild magic there. What this entails is not fully to my knowledge yet, I'll get to it when I do, but essentially this means that although Elves are magical, they are primates.

Drow and Shadar-kai were deeply affected by, specifically, the Unseelie court/Winter regions of the Feywild (which, includes bits of the Shadow Plane as well). The main distinction between these two in my world is mostly aesthetics;

Shadar-kai were affected more by the Shadow aspects and malevolent spirits of the Unseelie court, leading them to be in a permanent state between life and death, cold and uncaring.

Drow stayed mostly in the Autumn region, closer to Summer than the Shadar-kai were, leading them to be less pessimistic, more emotive, and just slightly warmer in general. And, there they met Lolth. Lolth was heavily changed in my world, but I love the spider aesthetics and certainly wanted to keep them :) As part of this meeting, where the religious devotion began, Lolth promised to make their children in her image as long as they promised to be devoted and hold her close. Her protection, too, was not far behind. Spiders are venerated, and more creepy imagery and strange-looking mutations are just part of this culture, knowing their goddess is looking out for them.

So, to my question; Is there a way you can think to make them more spider-like without sacrificing too much humanoid aesthetics? It's magic after-all, so I'm not concerned that it makes no sense for a primate to have, like, venom or whatever.

I was thinking;

Vestigal limbs

Eye mutations

Limb whiskers (different from primate hair)

Something to do with the teeth?

Idk. Thanks for reading, any consideration you may make, and if you decide, helping me out :)

Hi! here is a more humanoid spider drow design, as opposed to the more spidery ones i posted earlier.

(image description: A simplified sketch of a bipedal drow with spider features. They have stiff body hair, facial whiskers, and claws on all their fingers and toes. From their ribs, they have two pairs of small spider legs. They also have spider fangs and tiny extra eyes. end description)

The extra eyes have been labeled "simple" because there are different categories of eyes. Humans and most other vertebrates have complex eyes. Most insects have compound eyes. And a lot of creatures all over the animal kingdom have simple eyes, sometimes alongside complex eyes. there are some amphibians with extra eyes on their heads, for example. but they're just simple eyes, so they're small and really only function to track changes in light overhead. I think the extra eyes on spider drow would have a similar function, just helping track motion via changes in light and other such simple visual tasks.

I am still working on the bigger asks, but i have some interesting facts on this one! after digging around to find an article that was not a deep pile of academic jargon, i found this! it explains that spider's can grip various surfaces by using their hairy feet to basically conduct static electricity to an extreme level.

"Spiders can walk upside-down across almost any type of surface because they exploit electrostatic, van der Waals forces, according to a team of German and Swiss scientists. The team has also calculated that these forces are strong enough to allow the animal to carry more than 170 times its own body weight (A Kesel et al. 2004 Smart Mater. Struct. 13 512). The results could be exploited to develop new types of adhesives...

By using atomic force microscopy, Kesel and co-workers then showed that each setule can produce a force of over 40 nanonewtons. This is extremely high considering that a spider typically has a mass of only about 15 milligrams. According to the Bremen-Zurich group, van der Waals forces between individual molecules – which are only nanometres apart – in the setules are responsible for this adhesive force. These individual forces combine to produce a very strong overall force on each of the spider’s eight feet.

The team calculated that if 600 000 tips are in contact with a surface, a spider can produce a total force of about 0.025 Newtons, which means it could carry 173 times its own body weight. Moreover, the forces are not affected by the environment and this allows the spiders to walk across wet or slippery surfaces."