Watroach

Watroaches, also called war beetles, are huge wandering insects of the city-state heartlands. An adult is more than 30 feet long and 20 wide, and its central hive chamber rises 30 feet high. Its body has three parts, head, hive chamber and thorax, carried on six stubby legs that sprout from a central cluster. The broad head hugs the ground, its toothy mouth set between lethal pincers, and its neck is startlingly nimble, letting it snatch big insects, its main prey. A sticky, hollow tongue probes under rocks and into cracks, sucking small bugs straight down.

Its rear section stores digested food and fluids and connects to the honeycombed hive chamber, home to millions of drone young under an inch long who tend a developing proto-adult at the center. Its exoskeleton is deep purple or black. Lacking any language, watroaches pay no heed to other adults they meet, though psionics or magic can communicate with them.

Each round a watroach can bite with its pincers for 3-18 and strike with both forelegs for 1-12 each. Against clearly slower foes it may trample instead, passing its full length over one target in a round; the victim makes six saves vs. petrification, one per leg, taking 2-16 for each failure. Only one target per round can be trampled.

A watroach is a loner and a community at once: adults never travel or hunt together, yet each carries an entire self-sustaining colony inside it.

An adult lives only to eat, so its hive will flourish when it dies. Drones bathe, feed and tend the proto-adult until the parent grows too old to move. As the parent lies dying, the proto-adult grows rapidly, and over three days it devours the parent's stored food and most of the honeycomb, eating its way out almost full-sized and already carrying its own drones and next proto-adult. A few old drones serve the new adult; most die in the sun beside the parent's corpse.

The insect necromancers who serve sorcerer tyrants' armies prize watroaches, whose size makes them ideal to kill, rebuild and animate. Hunters surround an adult in the desert and kill it, ideally with psionics to keep the body intact, then haul it back to a city on a huge wagon pulled by two or more dune hulks. There the brain, guts and most of the hive are removed, the drones smoked out over bonfires, and the dormant proto-adult thrown away. The top of the hive is usually cut open for a platform, and fighting positions are carved into all three body sections. Templar magic then raises it. A typical undead war watroach carries eight warriors plus its templar master, and it moves and fights just as it did in life. Two city-states field them most often, though others have tried them.