The purple worm, how have you dealt with / used it?

I was playing in a Pathfinder game a few months ago, and the DM sprang an ambush with a purple worm. Unfortunately, that DM had some... interesting... ideas about what sort of intelligence was required to use a charge attack, so we were able to defeat it by walking away slowly and preventing it from getting a second attack. (The first attack lost us a camel.) The second time one showed up, the sorcerer just turned it into a pile of ash.

the Jester said:

One memorable moment was at the end of Steaks, an adventure in... I think it's I13, but whatever it is, it's Adventure Pack 1. Basically, a bunch of small adventures for all levels in one product.

Steaks is a fun one that centers on a new restaurant in town that's serving up delicious steak and eating up all the business in town. The pcs are hired to investigate and figure out what's going on.

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Sounds like fun:

Spoilers:
[sblock]How about trolls? Or better yet, vampiric regenerating purple worms![/sblock]

A DM in my group is old-fashioned. We fought carrion crawlers for probably the first time a little more than a week ago. (A scuttler grabbed my wizard, climbed on the ceiling, and took him far away from the rest of the party. But it had maybe 5 hit points left, so one Thunderwave and the wizard was covered in green goop, dropped prone and since he was dazed by the poison...)

There are plenty of classic D&D monsters I have never faced, or used as a DM.

I've DM'ed action in the Worm's Gullet, a hollowed out Purple Worm corpse in Skullport--now a popular restaurant and casino. Does that count?

steeldragons said:

I have always found it kind dumb. How's the thing supposed to know or aim at something attacking it from behind?

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Tremorsense. Unless you're flying, a purple worm knows exactly where you are whether you're at its front end or its tail end.

I mean, unless you're in a massive cavern or catch the entire thing above ground (which has never happened in any game I've ever been in), how is it supposed to swing its back end around to stab at something?

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A purple worm is 80 feet long. On the surface, it could quite easily erupt 20 feet of its front end out of the ground at one place, and another 20 feet of its tail end in another spot up to 30 feet away. In fact, that might be a great way to play it as a solo encounter.

MarkB said:

Tremorsense. Unless you're flying, a purple worm knows exactly where you are whether you're at its front end or its tail end.

A purple worm is 80 feet long. On the surface, it could quite easily erupt 20 feet of its front end out of the ground at one place, and another 20 feet of its tail end in another spot up to 30 feet away. In fact, that might be a great way to play it as a solo encounter.

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I'll grant you the second one, though I do not recall anything in their description about purple worms being able to bore backwards or the stinger facilitating such a thing. Granted it's been a loooong long time since I've looked at it.

The first thing, though, this "tremorsense", is a 3e construction? Makes sense! But its not something I ever dealt with in play. Unless it was in the 1e description that they can sense things moving above ground [a la the Dune worms, which I've always believed they were based on. I could be wrong about that].

steeldragons said:

The first thing, though, this "tremorsense", is a 3e construction? Makes sense! But its not something I ever dealt with in play. Unless it was in the 1e description that they can sense things moving above ground [a la the Dune worms, which I've always believed they were based on. I could be wrong about that].

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The 1e Monster Manual says they "sense vibrations at 60' and move to attack." It also says of the tail stinger, "this weapon is only used in rear defense...or if the worm is fighting large or numerous opponents in a very spacious area which will allow it freedom to use its stinger."

GX.Sigma said:

The 1e Monster Manual says they "sense vibrations at 60' and move to attack." It also says of the tail stinger, "this weapon is only used in rear defense...or if the worm is fighting large or numerous opponents in a very spacious area which will allow it freedom to use its stinger."

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Well there ya go.

Thanks.

One of the most memorable uses of a purple worm was in my 4e campaign as part of Lolth's grand epic-tier army. There was a group of elite drow archers mounted on a purple worm (with a howdah made from xorn-skin so that the riders could burrow through the earth along with the worm). The worm ate one of the PC's then regurgitated him in a cavern below, where he fought grimlocks while the rest of the group fought a completely separate battle on the surface.

Purple worms have seen a lot of use at my table.

A few times while running the D&D Next adventure (mentioned upthread). Another couple times in the Blingdenstone adventure (And yes, the PCs ran away).

The best use was during a 4th Edition campaign featuring a tiefling sorceress named Nox Amandine. She was the youngest daughter of a noble tiefling family, and they advance politically by assassinating their older siblings (much like the drow). In any case, the opening encounter saw a group of bandits hold up a noble ball, and a purple worm burrowed up and got stuck in the marble floor (becoming a hazard for the encounter, think Sarlacc and you're on the right track). Immediately after the fight, Nox 'accidentally' bumped her sister down the purple worm's gullet.

The purple worm managed to extricate itself, and the PCs found out about a rod that controlled purple worms; one of the bandit leaders had it in his hideout. So they tracked him down, killed him, and Nox claimed the rod. She was clever enough to figure out that while the rod did summon purple worms, it did not actually control them.

She eventually turned a purple worm loose against her eldest brother, and nearly got killed in the ensuing chaos. The whole party had a desperate fight to get away from all the enemies who were also trying to escape the purple worm while the beast swallowed Nox's brother. Then Nox herself used a potion of mimicry to impersonate her brother while making her escape.

The party later turned against Nox for her criminal ways. The campaign came to an end as Nox escaped captivity and fled town one step ahead of the rest of the party, though without her rod of purple worm summoning.

It's still one of the most talked-about short campaigns I've ever run.