Giant fog beetle

Giant fog beetle Picture Level 32 Family beetle family creatures Body Type Insect Undead No Areas Found The Broken Lands Greymist Wood BCS Yes HP <Not Known> Armor [?]

Attack Attributes Physical Attacks Pincer +228 AS Maneuver Attacks Green gas

Defense Attributes Melee 100 DS Ranged DS Bolt +102 DS Bard Base +97 TD Ranger Base TD Sorcerer Base TD Wizard Base TD Cleric Base TD Empath Base +112 to +118 TD Paladin Base TD Major Elemental +120 TD Minor Elemental +119 TD Major Spiritual +109 TD Minor Spiritual +109 TD Major Mental TD Minor Mental TD

Treasure Attributes Coins No Gems No Magic Items No Boxes No Skin a fog beetle carapace Other None

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 will not stun, and are immune to Mind Jolt (706).

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 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.

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 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.

See Also

• Beetles buffed to BCS (saved post)

References

• Giant fog beetle on Play.net bestiary

Near-level creatures

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