The Rocky See

**The Rocky See** is a chain of islands located to the east of the Unblemished Sea, filled to the brim with dakryphagous spiders, the sound of whose constant motion is like pebbles on a beach.

## Birthday

The Rocky See is the largest grouping of dakryphagous spiders in the Great Below. The few gnomes living in **Birthday**, the only gnomic settlement here, refuse to speak of their arachnid companions, only referring to them as their "generous neighbors of whom they will speak no ill." The dakryphagous spiders see and hear *everything,* and those who transgress are soundly punished. But spider territory is not forbidden ground; on occasion, people may venture into the pitch-dark **Scuttering Reaches** to gather silk in preparation for their festivities.

The inhabitants of the See are divided into two groups based on their functions: the **Weavers****,** who tend the webs, and the **Widows**, who care for and feed the spiders. Luckily for visitors, the spiders have instituted what they call the **Accord of Grace**, which usually lets visitors commune with the gnomes here unscathed. *Usually*. Silk traders are common here, but they're notoriously tight-lipped and artificial, arguably even robotic.

The main contact in this wretched place is the rather passive-aggressive drow elf called by the gnomes **Lloth, Emissary of Spiders**. This eyeless but well-informed individual is willing to conduct business with sea-captains; she acts as the "mouth" of the spider-council here, and she also occasionally acts as a tour guide for visitors.

**The Festival of Silk** is a much-awaited annual event where the inhabitants of the See can *finally* let loose and have a good time, before going back to their colorless lives.

Near the See lies the wreck of **the *Black Velvet***, a ship that the spiders emptied and covered in webs.

## Webbed Secrets

Dakryphagous spiders have the mysterious ability to travel between mirrors, which can be useful for infiltration and assassinations.

The spiders of the Rocky See have formed an alliance with an avaricious Lorn-Fluke. The Fluke would blind a sea-beast that knows the Signatures, and the spiders would give it troves of secrets in return. The Fathomking seems to have a strong enmity with the dakryphagous spiders, and Drownies who dare trade with them are promptly executed in his court.

The Rocky See is guarded by **the Tree of Ages**, a living ship of huge spider-councils, made from a complex series of deals the spiders struck and betrayed. Eventually, they seek to become **the Tree of Epochs**, which will "stretch through the Great Below to become the perfect geometry of sorrow".

Another spider-council on the See is **the Tree of Seasons**, which is smaller but arguably even worse. The Tree of Seasons resides within **the Web of Stone**, which is also home to various eyeless cultists. It has trapped several unfortunate beings within cocoons to extract their secrets, and these poor souls' only refuge is death itself. Branches of webs hang in their thousands from the colossal statue of some being as far from an angel as an angel from a man. The spider-council has made its home in the chipped-out eyes, surrounded by its lessers and a precious collection of ensnared unfortunates. Hundreds of these captives dangle in silk cocoons, the sane and still-living tended to just enough to serve their full measure of both use and suffering.

Mysteriously, the Rocky See also has architecture that evokes the Third City.