However, failing by sufficient margin should activate the chamber, spraying the character in question with another round. A difficult crafting, nature-related or similar skill check should allow characters to harvest the chemicals inside the giant beetle. These beetles have chambers in their bodies filled with caustic and volatile chemicals–curious, ambitious, or reckless adventuring parties might want to capitalize on that potential. After the combat is where things have the potential to get interesting. The bombardier beetle represents an opportunity for a character to take something out ofÂ a battle other than treasure or experience points. In AGE games, a high-cost stunt may be warranted, while in Cypher System games, getting hit with a giant beetle’s butt cannon is a pretty great GM intrusion.

In OGL-adjacent games, a recharge roll is one potential way of handling it. Bombardier BeetleĪ giant bombardier beetle should be a fairly straightforward fight–its rear armament should be devastatingly powerful, but deployed sparingly.

These ants could also easily be used in a trap in a jungle encounter, or as the mindless but dangerous servants of a local nature spirit. The key to this encounter is to ensure that the ants are not individually powerful or threatening, but even a handful could easily swarm and kill a character who succumbs to their sting. When a character is incapacitated, all the ants in the immediate area should begin swarming that character. Finally, any character who fails one of these rolls should suffer these same penalties for the rest of the encounter, as the memory of the sting is fresh and painful. Additionally, whenÂ bitten, characters are in such evident (and loud) pain that all other players within visual or auditory distance suffer penalties to attack and defense rolls due to distraction and fear. roll or be entirely incapacitated until they succeed on subsequent rounds. When hit, PCs must make a difficult Constitution/Endurance/Might/Etc. The secondary effects of this damage should be incapacitating, however. The ants, when they hit, should only do a single hit point worth of damage. Character parties with extensive area of effect damage options will need to face more ants, and those without any such options should face fewer. In order to simulate this, there should be half a dozen or more ants per PC, each of which should have only a single hit point (or game equivalent). In a fantasy setting it’s always tempting to make insects huge versions of themselves, so why not mix things up a little bit and have your PCs face a swarm of completely normal-sized, non-magical ants, any one of which can potentially knock characters out with a single bite? With that kind of recommendation, how can we not use it in games? (Editor’s note: don’t do that.) Bullet Ant But the reality is: 1) it’s almost impossible to find unrestricted, royalty-free pictures of obscure insects and 2) if you want to lick a bullet ant, there is no way I’m going to try to prevent you from doing that. I would like to pretend this is because I’m worried about the well-being of Gnome Stew readers and that I want to prevent y’all from, I don’t know, licking a bullet ant or something.

On that note, none of the images in this article are actually of the insects or arachnid behavior in question. I’m no biologist, and this certainly isn’t Gnational Geographic. Proceed with caution and/or a can of Raid.įrom Shelob in the Lord of the Rings to whatever that guy’s name was in The Metamorphosis, since as far back as I can be bothered to “research,” insects and spiders have been used to terrify audiences and/or also make them feel very smart: a tradition this article plans on proudly continuing by providing paper-thin overviews of really cool things without getting into the nitty-gritty of the stuff that actually makes it work. Content warning: as you’ve probably gathered from the title and picture, this article deals with insects and spiders, topics you or your gaming group may not be totally comfortable with.

Bombardier beetle grounded