Desert Antloid

Antloids are giant desert ants split into four specialized castes: workers, soldiers, dynamis and queens. All have six legs, segmented bodies, sharp mandibles for cutting, carrying or fighting, and a heavy shell that resists both weapons and dehydration. Their senses sit at the front of the head: compound eyes see across 180 degrees and grant 60-foot infravision, and segmented antennae carry messages and feel nearly any vibration within 30 feet.

Workers: Stocky, 8 feet long, sapphire blue, each devoted for life to one task such as hauling water or food, tending the queen, or building the warren. They are the strongest caste, nearly as strong as giants, but their mandibles are built for lifting rather than fighting. They fight only if someone tries to take what they carry or threatens the queen, crushing foes for 1d6+12. Workers eat sand along with their food and excrete a concretelike material for building; a 5-cubic-foot section takes 100 points of damage to break.

Soldiers: Longer and sleeker, about 10 feet, mottled in dark blue, green and gray, with huge sharp mandibles that bite for 3d6. Infantry soldiers have a 17-foot stinger at the end of the metasoma that strikes for 1d4 and injects neurotoxin. Archer soldiers lack the stinger but can spray a thin jet of the same poison 50 feet. Either poison (Type D: 30/2-12) allows a save: failure costs 30 points of damage, success only 2d6, though a successful save can still kill a badly hurt victim. Soldiers are immune to their own venom. They explore, defend the warren and its water, mate with the queen, and raid the surrounding land for food.

Dynamis: The oddest and deadliest caste, gray-black, with a tiny head, a withered metasoma, and a swollen midsection housing a big brain that gives them intelligence and psionics. Their psionics: in telepathy, the mind link science with contact and telepathic projection; in psychometabolism, the shadow form and death field sciences with flesh armor, heightened senses, double pain, cause decay, chemical simulation and absorb disease. Linking with other dynamis costs nothing, so all of a warren's dynamis stay in constant touch. They lead with psionics and fight in melee only as a last resort, preferring to team up: they creep close in shadow form, then raise a death field that leaves the target easier prey for soldiers, or combine cause decay with chemical simulation and double pain. They will burn every PSP in a skirmish and die to protect the queen. As the warren's masters, they keep soldiers foraging, workers busy, and the queen safe and comfortable.

Queens: Usually one per warren, bloated, red to apricot, often over 20 feet long, existing only to lay 10-20 eggs a week in the warren's deepest defensible chamber, attended by immature young queens. Sterile workers tend the eggs, of which 1% hatch as queens, 4% as dynamis, 15% as soldiers and the remaining 80% as workers. When any caste grows too numerous, the dynamis have the surplus eggs eaten to keep the colony balanced. A mature queen can release pheromones into an adjacent 60-cubic-foot area. One scent draws fertile soldiers to her chamber to mate; the other, used against rival young queens and intruders including humanoids, causes madness. Victims save vs. poison at -4 or suffer vivid hallucinations, often of burning, drowning or being attacked by a dreadful foe. They can only fight or flee the imagined threat, and each round they stay in the pheromones they must make a system shock roll or die of the delusion.

Above ground a warren is a mound up to 250 feet across and 25 feet high. Below, it forms an inverted cone, broad at the top and narrowing as it plunges, often down to a small underground water source. Any treasure, meaning shiny or pretty things, ends up in the queen's chamber for her enjoyment. Antloids leave a warren when water or food runs out, when every queen dies by accident, or to make war on another warren. Now and then a renegade dynamis leads a young queen, a few workers and a couple of soldiers off to found a rival warren, but most such ventures fail.

Enter any warren with care, inhabited or not. Abandoned ones rarely make safe shelter, since other dangerous desert creatures move into the empty tunnels, and the shifting sands keep every warren close to collapse. There is a 15% chance of finding water at the bottom of a deserted warren, and something new is often guarding it.