Doom Locust

Doom locusts, sometimes called hungerbabies, are big locusts with the heads of infants, complete with compound eyes and strong mandibles, and wings like panes of stained glass. Of their six legs, two are shriveled baby arms and the rest are spiny insect legs. Alone, one sounds like a crying child; together, the swarm's wailing merges into a vast voice chanting "Doom, doom."

They never attack alone, mobbing a target in groups of 5-10 that cover the victim and bite it to death, scratching and clawing for an extra 1d2 points of damage whenever they are close enough to bite. They chew through metal and stone, so they treat every Armor Class as two levels worse than it is.

Twice per day the whole swarm can engulf one creature in a shrieking whirlwind. The target must save vs. wands or be eaten down to the bones; even a successful save means it tears loose only after taking 4d6+2 points of damage.

In bright light, the glare off their glassy wings has a 25% chance of blinding one random opponent every other round. They also have a peculiar charm: any female who tries to hurt one falls under an effect identical to a charm spell, seeing her own child's face on it whether or not she has children, and from then on she will not let the hungerbabies be harmed.

Magical fire harms them, and a single locust can be turned as a mummy. The swarm itself cannot be driven off unless the coming doom is prevented. If the doom has not been averted by midnight on the night the last locust dies, the whole swarm rises again and keeps tormenting the region.

These creatures herald catastrophe across the misty dread realm. Since no two swarms have ever been recorded at once, many believe only one exists. Roughly a week before disaster strikes, the swarm arrives, settles on the edge of the doomed area and spends one day doing nothing but singing its mournful song. When the last voice falls silent, children's graves split open all over the area and a second swarm crawls out. The doubled host then devours the place, eating plants, soil, animals, timber, stone, metal and people, though oddly the harm is rarely as bad as a natural locust plague. On the night before the true disaster they fly off into the dark, and by morning the foretold doom has struck.

Stories of them appear across the realm, often in holy writings. Accounts of giant locusts carrying off children spread just before one great upheaval and again in a mist-shrouded realm right before a terrible season of death, and they are frequent visitors to a starving, fanatical domain and a range of volcanic peaks. The Game Master can use them as an ominous signal that a major campaign event is coming.

Doom locusts are unnatural and give nothing back to the land, leaving only ruin. A slain locust bursts into flame and melts into a puddle of toxic black sludge. Many scholars class them as a strange kind of undead.