Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="Set" data-source="post: 4576575" data-attributes="member: 41584">I use them when they're called for, and prefer them at lower levels to 'fantasy monsters.' I tend to give 'mindless vermin' an Int score of 1 (since bugs can be trained, and it solves the weird corner cases of how Drow / Duergar etc. training 'riding spiders' and the like), and get rid of the 'mindless' special quality. In my Freeport game, the party ended up encountering brightly colored giant praying mantises, with ornate carapaces, and discovered later that, thousands of years ago, the Valossan's used them as guardian beasts, and the different colors represented the different noble houses, as they each modified their own servant critters to show 'house colors' and the like.  (I kind of wanted to evoke the feel from the book Congo, where an animal species reflected behaviors and the like imposed upon them by a long-dead human civilization.) They've also dealt with vermin in other ways.  An alchemist might hire them to capture giant spiders, so that he can 'milk them' for the materials to make Tanglefoot Bags, or whatever. They ran into a creature type I called the Sun Kings, which was just a locust swarm with a hive-mind intelligence of 6, statistically, but was a swarm of red and yellow carapaced flying beetles who carried fine glaives made from obsidian and chitin, and fine shields made from cast off carapaces (and who glowed faintly, because of a phosphorescent bacteria that lived in their hive).  The 'Sun Kings' lived in huge termite-mound like nests, which had bones and bamboo rods inserted into the structure, both for support, and so that the hollow insides of the rods and bones made for pre-made uncollapsible tunnels (and also stuck out of the mound in all directions, like impromptu pungee-stick 'earthworks').  Deep in the hive, the Earth Queen, a sessile Int 9-10 bug the size of a housecat, with the casting ability of a 1st to 3rd level Adept, created alchemical mixtures within her own body from the materials her swarms of minions brought her, secreting them in fleshy sacs for use defending the lair. After fighting off the first couple swarm attacks, and finding the 2 meter high, 3 meter across 'mound,' the party then had to fend off attacks of acid and alchemical fire being lobbed from the nest! So yeah, I threw my players against Locust Swarms that used alchemist's fire.  I'm crazy that way...</blockquote>

Verification