CAVE FISHER

Cave fishers are hard-shelled, many-legged creatures that live by trapping animals in the subterranean world. 

To trap its prey, a cave fisher employs a super-strong, highly adhesive filament which extends from its proboscis. This filament is 60-feet long, and tipped with a powerful adhesive sucker. A cave fisher can shoot this filament from its proboscis with great speed and accuracy, striking as a 6 hit dice monster. It will then "reel in" its prey at a rate of 15 feet per round, using a complex organic winch housed in an armored protuberance behind its head. A cave fisher can pull in prey weighing up to 400 pounds (4,000 gp weight).

The adhesive on the sucker head also coats the filament, and it can be dissolved by liquids with a high alcohol content or a cave fisher's blood, which also contains a lot of alcohol. The filaments are so strong that they can be cut only by a +1 or better edged weapon and so thin that there is only a 20% chance of noticing them within 10 feet and no chance beyond that distance.

When the cave fisher's prey is drawn in, the creature kills and dismembers it with its pincers, cutting it into pieces suitable for ingestion. Two of the cave fisher's 8 legs end in powerful pincers. The other 6 are used by the creature to attach itself to the rock of its hiding place, cementing itself in place with the same adhesive that coats its filament.

Cave fishers prefer to hide on ledges over much-traveled paths. They string their filaments across a likely spot for catching small flying creatures. If something enters the cave fisher's range but does not blunder into its filament, the creature will silently reel its filament in (taking 1 round to do so) and then fire at the potential victim. If it misses, it will try again for as long as the prey is in range.

A cave fisher's ledge or niche is usually covered with the bones and belongings of its victims. If the local animals learn to avoid a cave fisher's abode, it will dissolve its bindings and crawl on to a new are where the prey is less wary.