Giant Dragonfly

Where ordinary dragonflies are a farmer's friend, the giant kind is a hunter that will go after anything its own size or smaller. Adults gleam with metallic color, most often green, blue or gold, and some are striped or spotted. Their four matching wings are clear, with dark veins running through a glittering amber film. The six legs are long and fragile, barely able to let the insect balance on a branch. They cluster tightly where they meet the body and then splay outward, so the dragonfly can draw them together into a wide basket.

Four wings let the giant dragonfly hover in place or flash away at astonishing speed. It gains a -3 bonus on initiative, and when it wins initiative it can dart in, strike and get clear before its foes can answer in melee. Its zigzag flight also spoils aim: missiles fired at it take -4 when it holds initiative and -2 even when it does not.

Against tiny or small targets it scoops the victim into its leg basket and eats it on the wing. A creature trapped this way takes bite damage automatically every round until nothing is left. Bigger opponents are attacked with darting bites from the mandibles.

Because a giant dragonfly attacks and eats nearly everything it sees, the species never forms real groups. Several hunting the same territory may nonetheless swarm a slower target together, though any dragonfly hurt in the fray is apt to become the next meal for its fellows.

These insects mate and breed in flight near water, which is also their favorite hunting ground, but they are powerful fliers and often turn up over dry country miles from any pond. Other giant flying insects are their usual prey, though they seize warm-blooded quarry whenever they can. They cannot survive freezing and live in almost every climate short of polar lands and deserts. In the tropics they grow even larger and use the statistics given in parentheses.

Depending on warmth, the eggs take 12-20 days to hatch, and the young spend about a year as larvae; in temperate regions they hibernate over winter and emerge as adults the following spring. The wings are worthless, but the shimmering metallic skin is valued for clothing and ornament in some regions. Skin preserved by magic can fetch as much as 600 gp a square foot, and an ordinary specimen yields about six square feet, a tropical one roughly eight.

The larvae, also called nymphs, are no less ravenous than their parents but wingless, wholly aquatic and poor swimmers. They hide in burrows, weed beds or sunken debris on the bottoms of ponds and lakes and wait for prey. An abdominal organ can fire a powerful water jet every other round, and a nymph launching itself from cover this way surprises its victim 50% of the time. Its mandibles are even deadlier than an adult's, yet when not in use they are folded under a rubbery, lip-like flap, so a nymph spotted ahead of time often looks like a harmless, toothless thing.