Aspis

The aspis are a hive race of large insects living in burrows just under the surface. Nearly everyone who meets them meets the drones, the adult males. Larvae and the hive's cow are almost never seen by outsiders.

They have no voice in the usual sense. Hive members talk by releasing subtle odors that no human nose can follow, and only about 5% of them ever pick up a crude version of the common tongue.

A drone resembles a giant weevil with a hard gray or off-white shell that turns blows well. Its head carries two compound eyes, short blunt feelers and a long snout. Each of its six legs ends in a bunch of delicate gripping claws.

For battle, a drone rears onto its hindmost pair of legs, freeing four limbs to hold two weapons and two shields, which improves its Armor Class to AC 2. Short swords and hand axes are the usual arms. Bows don't suit its build, but it can use a strange light crossbow, and javelins and other thrown weapons turn up too. Drones take no damage from cold or electricity and only half from fire. Defending the cow, they never check morale and die rather than give way.

Retreating drones leave traps behind them, and the passages around the cow's chamber and the grub rooms are trapped at all times regardless. Expect pits, rockfalls and other rough contraptions; fine work such as poisoned needles is beyond them.

Every aspis starts as a grub, white or pale pink, like a huge maggot. Its soft skin parts easily under swords and other edged weapons. Larvae are blind and deaf, finding food by smell and by tremors in the ground, and bite as their only attack. They eat without pause, wallowing in hatcheries that are little better than giant cesspits, where scraps and waste are dumped into a foul soup. Anyone who is not an aspis must save vs. poison on entering or be violently sick until taken away from the stench.

Rarely, the drones pick out one grub, separate it, and raise it on a special diet. It never becomes a drone. Instead it grows into a cow, a vast larva up to 15 feet long when grown. It moves slowly and clumsily, but its bite is deadly simply because of its size, and its body oozes a corrosive slime.

Drones have no names, personalities or selves. Clever as they are, they act only on the cow's orders and use their own judgment only when those orders cannot reach them.

A nest is a network of chambers linked by low tunnels dug in soft earth or rock. It holds one to three egg chambers, up to six hatcheries with 1d10 larvae apiece, and two to four granaries. The cow lives in a great chamber at the center whose floor and walls are thick with her white, acidic slime. It dissolves wood or metal in one round and burns living flesh for 1d8 damage per round until rinsed away. Aspis of every kind are immune.

No one matches the aspis as masters of scent. They blend compounds that mimic nearly any odor and use them in all sorts of ways. A town that moves against a hive might wake to find its walls daubed with a tacky yellow fluid smelling faintly of chlorine, which draws giant rats and other rodents and drives them berserk. Such reprisals are uncommon, but not uncommon enough to ignore.

With drones that fierce, the aspis have few natural foes, and they generally keep to themselves. Most trouble starts when lean times push a colony to raid nearby human communities for food and goods. They are true omnivores with efficient digestion and can live on almost any organic matter.

Through chemical signals they tame other giant insects, most often giant ants as guards: 1d10 in a typical nest, or ten times that number 10% of the time. Whether they can command smarter insect-like creatures such as cave fishers or giant hornets is unknown, though most sages think not.

Alchemists pay well for the cow's acid, useful as a plain corrosive and as an ingredient in magical inks and potions dealing with acid and corrosion.