Giant fog beetle
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The giant fog beetle appears to be some sort of giant insect. It looks a little like some misshapen scorpion, but the tail on it is not as long as a scorpion's would be, and it flares like the tail of a lobster rather than ending in a poison sting. The segmented body is wide, supported by six short multi-jointed legs. A dull red chitinous shell covers most of its body, and a broad carapace protects its head. Two massive claws provide the creature with formidable weapons.
Hunting strategies
Fog beetles are immune to Mind Jolt (706) and do not stun for Implosion (720). They are like some other stun resistant creatures in that they will stun for Evil Eye (717).
They will fight with the hooded figures and the jungle trolls. They do not fight back, though when figures cast Cone of Elements (518), it hits the fog beetles.
Other information
Fog beetles are puncture resistant rather than puncture immune since being converted to BCS.
- Other Messaging
A giant fog beetle comes scrambling into view, seemingly from nowhere. A giant fog beetle nudges your corpse with its head. A vile green liquid slowly drips to the ground from the underside of a giant fog beetle. A giant fog beetle gnashes its mouthparts and begins to nervously flap its wings at a rapid pace. It takes flight! A giant fog beetle hovers north, its wings a flurry of movement.
Gas Maneuver
A giant fog beetle rears up momentarily and hisses loudly. A huge cloud of green gas pours from an orifice on the creature's underside! The cloud of gas rolls in your direction. You scramble out of the way and easily avoid it.
- Failure resulting in RT:
A giant fog beetle rears up momentarily and hisses loudly. A huge cloud of green gas pours from an orifice on the creature's underside! The cloud of gas rolls in your direction. You try to scramble out of the way but the cloud of gas rolls over you, causing you to cough and choke! Roundtime: 5 sec.
- Failure resulting in RT and poison (10-11 per round dissipating 3 per round):
A giant fog beetle rears up momentarily and hisses loudly. A huge cloud of green gas pours from an orifice on the creature's underside! The cloud of gas rolls in your direction. You try to scramble out of the way but the cloud of gas rolls over you, causing you to cough and choke! You feel a fierce poison coursing through your veins! Roundtime: 5 sec.
- Purify Air (207) provides complete immunity to the attack:
A giant fog beetle rears up momentarily and hisses loudly. A huge cloud of green gas pours from an orifice on the creature's underside! The gas washes over you and you calmly breathe it in like it was pure air.
Behind the Scenes
Uthex Kathiasas did not have an Iruaric name for these insects, and it did not change with the end of the I.C.E. Age. They appear to be "other standard" (non-demonic) extra-planar entities from Rolemaster called Dictics, who were quite simply large insect-like creatures from another plane of existence. Their chitin had the strength of "fine steel", and they were unintelligent. The premise was that they came in many variations, much like beetles in real life, infesting other planes of existence when they find their way to them. This would explain the dust beetles which were in Shadow Valley before the shadow steeds returned to fight the "wyrm." It explains why they seem to arrive out of nowhere. They have often appeared where there has been historical presence of the major demonic. They are not considered extraplanar beings for system purposes in GemStone IV.
The fog beetles are probably an allusion to the "beetle civilisation" that was supposed to follow the end of the race of man in "The Shadow out of Time" by H.P. Lovecraft. The idea was that an immensely knowledgeable race would transfer their minds into other races of the future, "the bodies of whose members the cream of the Great Race would seize when the monstrous doom overtook the elder world", which in this context is the Lords of Essaence and the First Era cataclysm. Their portals were capable of time travel, and the Dark Shrine inscription is a temporal anomaly. There is a similar premise regarding the crystal dome, apparently an allusion to "Through the Gates of the Silver Key".
The Jagged Plain can be regarded as the analog of the plateau of Leng, due to the monastery and hooded figures, and allusions to "At the Mountains of Madness". However, it refers also to the underworld in "The Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath", escaping the Vale of Pnoth into a plain of giant boulders. In the background story for The Broken Lands these boulders originate in a meteor swarm. It is worth noting that Shadow Valley and the Jagged Plain are both shrouded by unnatural mist, where in the former case it was dust beetles and "The Mound", whose subterranean realm had the material world form of the vaults of Zin with sealed up shoggoths. It features another immortal telepathic race who performed cruel transmogrification experiments on life and reanimated corpses as slave labor. The gas cloud of green poison may refer to a recombinant manifestation of Cthulhu where: "the ship was befouled by an acrid and blinding green cloud, and then there was only a venomous seething astern."
However, the messaging on fog beetles has been modified over time, so it cannot safely be parsed that stringently. The beetles may also be taken as a specific reference to the Dream-Quest of Unknown Kadath when the narrator reaches Ngranek, shortly before being kidnapped to the underworld by night-gaunts, seeking the enormous carved face of the Great Ones. "Black caverns and odd crevices were still numerous on the sheer vertical cliffs, but none of them was accessible to a climber. There now loomed aloft a great beetling mass which hampered the upward view, and Carter was for a moment shaken with doubt lest it prove impassable." In The Broken Lands this face would be the eye windows of the Dark Shrine overlooking the Jagged Plain, though there is also a scene with mountain sized heads in the distance flying over the plateau of Leng to Kadath.
See Also
References
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