The fog over Felmist Marsh never fully lifts, and neither does whatever nests under it. Maggris has been down in the bog hollows longer than anyone currently wading through the marsh has been alive — long enough that the egg-sacs she doesn’t bother hiding aren’t a warning sign anymore, just scenery. She doesn’t reason with what wanders in. She ropes it down, calls the rest of the brood up to help finish it, and if that isn’t enough she finishes it herself.
The CR 7 set when Maggris was first rebuilt was calibrated against her alone, before the
module's other bosses existed for comparison. An audit of Felmist Marsh's real ambient
ceiling (excluding the several other creatures in that same bog sitting at CR 33–117 —
checked directly, and all of them carry the exact stock-stat-stick signature Maggris herself
used to have: 35+ Hit Dice in one class, identical ability scores across the board) found a
genuine ceiling of CR 20 (bele_felsp, a clean HD-to-CR match). She's bumped to
Vermin 20 (from 12) for CR 22 to clear it. The before/after box below still shows her original
rebuild from the CR 365 placeholder — this is a second pass on top of that one.
Maggris is the first boss in this set with no Intelligence to speak of and nothing resembling a spell list — a true vermin, same category the game already uses for the brood she calls up around her. Where Cairnbell controls a fight with reinforcements and Ysolde controls one with a slow drain, Maggris controls hers the way an actual spider colony would: bind what gets close, thin the herd with numbers, and only fight fair once there’s nothing left to lose. Every DC below is 10 + half her Hit Dice + her Constitution modifier — the standard Monster Manual formula for an extraordinary ability, derived at runtime from her own sheet rather than written in twice.
Layered on top of the module’s normal combat AI, which still picks her melee and positioning. The three phases aren’t the same trick playing faster — each one changes what kind of fight it is: a single-target snare, then a repeating add-summon that spreads the party out, then one execute-style finisher that doesn’t come back.
A strand of silk fired at whoever is nearest, every third round. It roots what it lands on and the venom on it works through their strength whether or not they're still standing in it — a leash, not an area.
She stops reaching for silk entirely and digs the brood up instead — two spiderlings the moment she crosses this line, two more every fifth round after, up to three calls in total. The fight stops being about her and starts being about how fast the table clears the floor.
The brood calls stop. Whoever is nearest gets wrapped and pumped full of everything she has left in one motion — and from that moment on she stops holding anything back for the rest of the fight.
CR 22, revised upward from the original design-intent CR 7 after auditing Felmist Marsh's real ambient ceiling — a 20-HD elemental spirit at CR 20, once the several 35–45 HD stat-sticks sharing her bog were confirmed as the same bug class her own original CR 365 belonged to and excluded. 240 hp is still exactly the monster-convention average for her new 20 HD plus a +7 Con modifier: nothing invented, nothing rounded up to feel scarier.
Three phases, three different pressures. The brief for this one was explicit: the last few bosses all escalated the same way, an aura that pulses harder each tier. Maggris doesn’t have an aura at all until the very end. Phase I is a leash on one target, phase II is an arithmetic problem for the whole party, phase III is a single coin-flip that either lands or doesn’t. None of the three read the same at the table, and none of the DCs moved — they already compute from her live Hit Dice and Constitution at runtime.
Vermin, not reflavored humanoid. Int 2 and no class levels mean no feats or skills that need an Intelligence score to qualify for — everything on her sheet is either a monster racial grant or paid for out of her own Hit Dice, same rule the audit tool checks every other blueprint against.
The brood spiderling exists so Brood Call has teeth without being unfair.
fm_mg_broodl is a deliberately small add (CR 1, 5 hp) built for this one purpose
— not a repurposed full-strength spider blueprint, which would turn phase II into a
second boss fight instead of a numbers problem. It was left untouched by this revision.
Like Lady Dire before her, Maggris didn’t start from a blank blueprint. The resref
bele_MAGGRIS already existed — the actual Hordes of the Underdark
“Maggris” unique model and portrait, already named “Maggris, the Hive
Mother,” already flagged BOSS 1 — sitting as one of eight always-on
entries in Felmist Marsh’s general spawn group, spawning as a stock Vermin template with a
Challenge Rating of 365. This box shows that original rebuild; the CR revision above is a
second pass on top of it.
j_ai_onspawnLMOD 10, RANGE 1 hardcoded
TYPE 26, BOSS 1, LOOPS 2, CLEAR 1
98: always, 12%, count 1–2, so most of the time nothing
happens, and occasionally two Hive Mothers answer the call at once.group_fmm_04 line couldn’t just be
cleared — it now spawns a small run of bele_viper instead, keeping the
other four entries after it alive.felmistmarsh001.git → the
sparky_variables placeable → enc07 = 98 (the first six slots
were already spoken for).j_ai_onsp_leader in place of the placeholder’s plain spawn, and scales to
1.15×.fm_mg_broodl is a new, deliberately
small blueprint (CR 1) built just for this fight rather than a reused full-strength spider.TYPE 26, BOSS 1,
LOOPS 2, CLEAR 1 — the undocumented LMOD and
hardcoded RANGE the placeholder carried are gone, so quality derives from the
area like every other boss in this set.audit.py bele_maggris fm_mg_broodl reports OK
on both.boss_cr_rebalance_import.erf
carries the updated blueprint.