Spider-like, slave-trading, rapacious merchant creatures
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Neogi are unusual creatures who usually look like a cross between a spider and an eel. They have a bloated body and eight limbs, two of which have simple claws, and are covered in light tan fur.
Neogi are slave traders and they consider everything either a slave or owner. All Neogi have several slaves, usually Umber Hulks, sometimes even other neogi. These neogi slaves have more slaves, leading to complex ownership hierarchy.
The sly, spiderlike neogi are strangers wherever they go. They travel far and wide in shallow-draft ships that are equally at home on rivers or oceans. Their caravans cross deserts and mountains and traverse the dark labyrinth of the underworld. In their graceful but terrifying ships, they even ply the skies and venture beyond to visit unimaginably distant worlds.
The appearance of neogi vessels or caravans in a land is seldom taken as a good event. Neogi are great traders and merchants, but they are even greater raiders and despoilers. They trade if they must, but they prefer to fill their holds with treasure and slaves by simply taking what they want and leaving ruin in their wake. With small armies of umber hulks and mentally enslaved minions, their far-ranging raids have made neogi the scourge of many worlds and planes.
The neogi are a great mystery to humans and their kind. No one knows where they come from; their origins lie in the Material Plane, but on an unknown world. Some sages speculate that the neogi world doesn’t exist anymore, and that the spiderlike creatures no longer have a true home. That might account for their endless wandering.
On other levels, the neogi are perfectly easy to understand. They are rapacious plunderers, greedy merchants, gleeful murderers, and slave hunters of the worst kind. They view everything, including their own lives, as something to be owned, and anything that can be owned is worth taking by any means.
Neogi are vicious, spiderlike scavengers, raiders, and slavers that sometimes disguise their predatory practices beneath a guise of mercantile dealings. No commodity or business is too sordid for the neogi, and any creatures dealing with the monsters would be wise to take steps to make sure they were not cheated - or simply decide that murder and robbery are better business.
Neogi undergo three distinct stages in their lives: spawn, adult, and great old master. Spawn are small, hungry hunters, barely sentient. Adults are the most commonly encountered neogi - voracious, cruel, and brilliant monsters consumed with lust for gold and power. Great old masters are huge, bloated neogi approaching the end of their life spans, serving as living incubators for the next generation of neogi spawn.
NEOGI SOCIETY
There’s nothing to admire about neogi culture. These creatures are vicious murderers, plunderers, and slavers that only occasionally attempt to disguise their bottomless avarice as mercantile interest. Their rapacity has made them the rivals of every thinking race in the world. Neogi traders lie, steal, cheat, and deceive at every opportunity, but they have the ability to travel in places where humanoids would meet a swift and terrible death, and they can deal with creatures that would be absolutely inimical to any human trader. This means that neogi can get their claws on all sorts of unwholesome goods and commodities, and greedy humans always hope to profit by commerce with the neogi and their clients.
Of all the races that neogi enslave, umber hulks are their favorites. Every adult neogi possesses at least one umber hulk, raised from birth to a life of slavery and conditioned to accept that situation as the natural order. These umber hulk slaves take orders from any neogi without question or thought. Umber hulk guards keep less compliant slaves (those under the effect of the neogi’s enslave ability) under control and also act as soldiers in neogi armies and slave raids.
In the neogi worldview, ownership is what fuels the universe. Everything belongs to the neogi as a whole - if not now, then it did in the past or it will in the future. Even a neogi can be owned as a slave by another neogi, and the slaves can own property and slaves, and those slaves can own property and other slaves, and so on.