Formian

Formians, also called centaur ants, look like ants that have learned to stand up, though their minds are those of thinking warm-blooded beings rather than insects. A flexible waist lets them lift head and thorax and walk on just four legs. Each foreleg bends at a wrist and ends in three opposable claws used both as hands and as weapons. Their muted colors have no purpose beyond showing which city a formian comes from.

Like real ants they come in castes. Workers, the smallest and most common, are as big as a large dog, with crude claws suited to hard labor. Warriors are pony-sized and armed for defense. Myrmarchs are as big as a horse, and their claws are defter than human hands. The rare queen is half again a myrmarch's size; she runs the city from the central hive, never leaves it, and her legs have wasted away.

Formians talk among themselves in a language few outsiders can follow. Warriors and higher castes can also speak Common, though it comes out as a weird chittering.

Workers fight only when their city is besieged, nipping with small mandibles for 1d4 points. Warriors use mandibles, both forelegs and a venomous stinger; the sting deals 2d4 points of damage, and a failed save vs. poison imposes -2 on attack rolls for 1d6 turns. Myrmarchs bite and sting, and their venom inflicts 3d12 damage plus 1d4 turns of paralysis, while a successful save vs. poison halves the damage and prevents paralysis. Queens have no attacks.

There is no hive mind. A queen can send messages to her subjects and can even command and directly control them, but each formian can act on its own when necessary. Lower castes automatically obey direct orders from any higher one, so a worker must heed warriors, myrmarchs and its queen, yet only a queen can give orders to a myrmarch. The immobile queen is always guarded by 20 myrmarchs ready to die for her. Her intellect is supra-genius and she could seize control of the entire hive whenever she wishes, though most leave their people some freedom.

Every formian is hatched into its caste and remains there for life. Like the clockwork beings of the plane of perfect order, they seem unable even to imagine wanting a higher station, and their history records no revolt. Formians on the Prime Material Plane wage war hive against hive, but those of their home plane have learned to coexist in peace. They have lived on that plane forever, and sages expect they always will.

Some of the grandest cities of the upper planes are formian work, and many hold more than 10,000 inhabitants. Above ground they look like ordinary walled human cities, but they burrow down for miles, and the buildings beneath the sand are said to match anything in the great planar city. Stranger still, formians build using methods no other people understand.