Giant insects and arachnids always seem to be one off encounters like "oh no, a giant spider! Well...

Giant insects and arachnids always seem to be one off encounters like "oh no, a giant spider! Well, that sure was a giant spider" instead of actually consequential creatures. How can we make giant insects more important? What are some giant arthropod focused plot hooks?

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youtube.com/watch?v=vKhVptqZAkg
youtu.be/OUrz4CtGuOM
rpgnow.com/product/116452/Better-Than-Any-Man
youtube.com/watch?v=_yNaRsrbqDg&t=1s
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_ant#Global_.22mega-colony.22
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A full-blown infestation: A village of 1,000 homes finds itself fending off dozens of giant insect attacks every week. The players are enlisted to destroy the source of the infestation which is likely a next housing an extra large female or mated pair. Even after destroying the source, care must be taken to eradicate all of the new potential couples or it will just happen again in a month or two.

I meant Nest, of course.

You killed a giant spider just for being in a room. You see that it's body had rudimentary tools and things on it. There's a satchel with stone cutting tools for collecting fungi. And an etching of it's mate. Not only did you kill a gatherer, but it's from a stone age society of hunter/gatherers. He was a father.

In my setting, pretty much everything uses magic in some sense. It's just a part of nature.
Insect hives have their own dedicated mage castes and you occasionally get a fire ball shot at you from a normal sized wasp nest.

Are we talking a full sized fireball or a wasp sized fireball? Either way that sounds hilarious.

...

It makes sense for them to be the sort of creatures that predate on humans but are otherwise difficult if not impossible to eradicate.

In the bad parts of cities where strict care is not taken giant insects (normally spiders) will hide and stalk the homeless and people who get lost by making use of minor illusion magic to mimic humans in distress.

When they do show up there is an effort made to eradicate them but attacks happen infrequently enough that people arn't going to breakout the flame throwers everytime a missing person is reported.

Obligatory nightmare fuel

youtube.com/watch?v=vKhVptqZAkg

Considering how quickly some insects are capable of moving and how strong they are for their size, a giant one would probably be a much bigger challenge than they are presented as in most games. But then, they might not be able to move as fast as they scale up in size and more and more energy is required to move at all.

Imagine a tardigrade the size of a polar bear.

>Tardigrades are one of the most resilient animals known: they can survive extreme conditions that would be rapidly fatal to nearly all other known life forms. They can withstand temperature ranges from 1 K (−458 °F; −272 °C) (close to absolute zero) to about 420 K (300 °F; 150 °C) for several minutes, pressures about six times greater than those found in the deepest ocean trenches, ionizing radiation at doses hundreds of times higher than the lethal dose for a human, and the vacuum of outer space. They can go without food or water for more than 30 years, drying out to the point where they are 3% or less water, only to rehydrate, forage, and reproduce.Tardigrades living in harsh conditions undergo an annual process of cyclomorphosis

Kehehehehe. One more reason to genocide hornets.

Eusocial insects all work together. Have a hive of sapient eusocials that don't understand how to be selfish.

arousing

so a small terrasque
sounds like a fun afternoon, lets ride it into town and see which church it crashes through first

Obligatory post-scarcity sentient spiders.

3.5 edition had an undead called a Bloodhulk which constantly oozed blood. Sentient spiders living in a city called Aranea create and crucify thousands of them, allowing them to create a gigantic spider city utterly devoted to the arts.

The spider population continued to grow, requiring the creation of endless hulks. Finally the spiders call a referendum and vote to embrace vanpiricism, becoming a population of immortals incapable of breeding abd so fixing the Malthusian issue they foresaw.

they actually fought giant tardigrades in the adventure zone a while back

>village of 1000 houses

I've noticed this in the DMG for 5e before, and I have to ask, do Americans really have zero sense of scale? Have any of you ACTUALLY been in a village, ever? And do you realise a real medieval village would have been much smaller than even an average modern village?

>How can we make giant insects more important?

The more I learned about actual insects, the more I learned that I didn't really need to do anything special with or to my own *giant insects to make them interesting because nature had taken care of me for it.
*I don't even make giant insects that giant. The biggest are usually the size of a beagle or a large house cat, but that's the beauty and horror of insects: you can size them up if you want, but they'll still be terrifying even if they're small.

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What about an encounter with CAPTAIN TARDIGRADE!?

youtu.be/OUrz4CtGuOM

Oh shit that's fucking rad

I've been trying to catch up to the whole thing, I only just finished Petals to the Metal

ftfy

>assuming american
>thinking this matters in a D&D/fantasy setting

the square cube law would dictate that a giant insect would be many, many times more heavy than it is larger, so you are probably right. They'd likely be very sluggish creatures.

They plant their eggs in humans traveling the woods. they slowly consume people from the inside out, rupturing the host when the young detect other people. Towns have fallen, others become zealously isolated, and are dying slowly. The party must figure out what the fuck is going on, and more importantly, why

That reminds me. Who remembers Cazadores from NV? Pic related, the size of a Doberman up to the size of a horse. They lay eggs in corpses, build nests, and display swarm/pack behavior. Thing is, they're based on tarantula hawks, whose sting was described by an entomologist as
>“To me, the pain is like an electric wand that hits you, inducing an immediate, excruciating pain that simply shuts down one’s ability to do anything, except, perhaps, scream. Mental discipline simply does not work in these situations. The pain for me lasted only about three minutes, during which time the sting area was insensitive to touch, i.e., a pencil point poked near the sting resulted only in a dull deep pressure pain."
It's also actually a paralytic, not a true kill-toxin. Its purpose is to incapacitate prey (Tarantulas) long enough to lay eggs inside them. So picture how goddamn horrifying living in Cazadore territory is. Bugs are goddamn horrifying.

Make them face something that they aren't used to stomp.

Truly Veeky Forums can waifu the shit outta any lifeform or inanimate object.

Have poison be a life-threatening problem, rather than 'oh I took an extra 3d6 this turn bummer'.

Stingwings were pretty shit compared to those beautiful bastards

Back when I worked hazmat spill response, one time while waiting for heavy equipment to show up, standing on the side of a highway, I saw for the first time in person a predatory wasp kill a spider. It then dragged its corpse backward down a small, unnoticeable hole in the pavement, which may have been the spider's own home. Watching that thing easily kill its prey, then disappear down that hole, knowing what it was about to do to it, honestly felt a bit dark and creepy to watch. Now just imagine it with humans instead of spiders. Imagine exploring your setting, be it post-apoc, medieval fantasy, Lovecraftian horror, whatever. You enter a quiet abandoned house that shows no sign of life. Get inside, discover it's basically a mud dauber nest packed with human corpses. And you just woke some wasps and/or their larvae.

Remind them that insects are basically robots in biological form and are unrelenting.

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Are leeches insects or insect enough?

WHAT THE SHITTING FUCK CUNT HELL IS THAT FUCKING THING

virgin detected

Sea snail that shoots one of its neurotoxin filled teeth into its prey like a harpoon.

Why is it not escaping? has it been paralyzed or something?

Did I get xp from it though?

Yes.

schhlloooooooooorrrrrrrppppp

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>That little AIDES in the corner
>Assuming this is supposed to represent something bad
>Frenchmen not knowing any better

Pretty sure it's an ad about practicing safe sex.

I could deduce that. Thank you, but I highly doubt scorpions have STDs. Prove me wrong Veeky Forums.

It's an analogy you autist

But I want to fuck the scorpion.

The implication is that while you may WANT to fuck the scorpion, you probably shouldn't since it might sting you and then you'd die.

So the French acknowledge the superiority of scorpion women?

Put a cork on it.

Well, use a condom.

Actually, there has to be some sort of cross-sentient species Kama Sutra, right? A book about How to fugg monstergirls? I think Mass effect had something like that for all the alien species. Theres an adventure in there somewhere.

>this centipede is a sexual predator

That.... That's a hell of a hook.

I... What? I don't hate this.

It's actually really neat. Cone snails generally use two different mixes of neurotoxins to immobilize prey. One is fast acting causing neurons at the injection site to not cease firing action potentials across the nervous system. Then the second slow acting set stops action potentials from jumping from nerves to the muscles, and so paralyzes the fish by stopping muscles. The fish is alive through the whole process.

Poor fishy.

Don't you know? Everything is bigger in America.

1000 is threshold between "village" and "town" out here.

I kid, the smallest thing we use out here is "town," so for city-dwellers in a nation that had "villages" for a relatively short period of its history, 1000 households is small.

correct. we don't use "hamlet" or "thorpe" over here.

hell in California, everything is a town until you hit about 20,000 people, then its a city. I've been to towns with about 35 people in them to towns with a few thousand.

It's more likely than you think.

That meme is too old. You are 1000 years old.

Well it just seems weird to me. The village I come from has about 800-900 inhabitants, which basically amounts to 150-200 houses, and that's a lot. The largest village in my country has 2500, which still comes around to basically 500 houses. A medieval settlement of 1000 houses is insanely huge for that time, and you'll have to consider anywhere from 5 to 10 or more people per house! That's a damn town already.
Villages in DnD should be more about... 10-20 houses with outlying farms or less.

A setting for one of my past campaigns included a giant centipede, nearly a kilometer long, that patrolled the jungle floor and forced all villages to be high in the trees. It was a mark of barbarism and reckless courage to be a "groundwalker", such as my younger sister's barbarian.

After a TPK and a 20 year time skip, it was eventually discovered that it was demonic in origin, displacing the god of the forest due to an international elf conspiracy.

They never fought it, but came across the signs of the centipede's passage a few times, and actually seemed to respect and fear it as a implacable force of nature.

The miners have been finding a lot of weird fossils in the coal seam but a mine flooding ended any further investigation. The giant tardigrades have rehydrated, run for your lives!

I love the sound of cicadas. Helps me sleep.

Bit of a spoiler for a Lamentations of the Flame Princess module.
Better Than Any Man features a whole slew of insect related shit. It's also free. And pretty fucked up, so take that into account. rpgnow.com/product/116452/Better-Than-Any-Man

I ran a three-shot that started off with the PCs as basically right hands of the king, as one does. And one day the king gets treasure in the form of a chest full of raw gold ore at the bid for some help, as a king does. And the request for help was little more than a crudely drawn map that led to a far off corner of the continent several days away. And so there were sent to investigate the problem, as knights do.

They ended up in a place called the Giant's Garden, dense with massive trees and megafauna, of which they only met an auroch, bless their hearts. Unfortunately, it belonged to a giant and so they were assailed, as one often is.

Victorious, they found themselves watch by a curious ant, notable in that it was several feet taller than one would expect an ant to be, and also it was vaguely humanoid, because why wouldn't it be? So they talk, and yes, the ants did ask for help, but the situation is complicated, so they follow.

The situation is not complicated at all, really. It's just that talking is hard. In reality, the ant queen had been taken hostage. Simple. And it was perpetuated by a group of mantid-like folk, who had umber hulks as captives. Battles ensued and tricky terrain was navigated, as it often is. Along the way they found an enchanted pair of giant fly wings and a ring of defense made out of a single, massive tarantula hair. Wondrous.

And when it came time for the twist, there was none. They got the queen away from her captors safely, only to find that, wait, there is a massive beast that has also come along and it is a froghemoth! Unimaginable! Resplendent was the "hole" ordeal of sticky grappling and underground gas vents releasing pleasant fumes. Upon slaying the beast and escaping intact, they returned home with new ear piercings from the actual ants they used to babelfish the chirping into common.

It was literally the cheesiest and most themed thing I've ever run. I could upload some hand drawn maps if you guys are interested, too.

Giant insects should be scary and weird.

>scale
>giant spiders

user

T-they breathe magically, o-okay?

One of them gets away and days later is seen having grown to a massive size! It's laying siege to the local village and they're powerless to stop it!

There is this one video I saw that mentioned using Phase Spiders as a plot hook. Basically it kidnapped sick/injured people from a local church since they were easy pickings by dragging them into the ethereal plane and storing them somewhere else, probably an unused crypt not too far from said church where it could eat them at its leisure later.

Party is sent in to investigate a string of disappearances since these people disappear without any trace (could make them roll investigation to see stuff like webbing, residue from the ethereal plane, etc).

Eventually lead them into said crypt and into the spider's nest where they have to deal with a strange looking giant spider capable of biting them doing piercing/poison damage and using Ethereal Jaunt as a bonus action and a swarm of its young harrying the party in the meanwhile.

youtube.com/watch?v=_yNaRsrbqDg&t=1s

Cone Shell. Deadly shellfish that fires a toxic harpoon at its prey before eating them.

This scene is great tho, just fucking punching the disgusting leeches.
I like movies in whcih humans actually fight back and not just get killed by the disgustingness of the creatures

The giant ants have formed a megacolony, and threaten to overwhelm the realms of men. The heroes must find a way to turn the ant colonies against each other again.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argentine_ant#Global_.22mega-colony.22

That fish didn't look too paralyzed towards the end. Does the toxin wear off right after the fish is swallowed?

In a setting I'm working on insects were the first life, or at the very least one of the very first forms of life. They are simple creatures with a simple will. As a result they lack souls, or even the simplified life forces of animals (and humans post the discovery of actual souls but don't tell them that). They are beings born purely of aether and the will which permeates and creates reality at its most basic form.

As a result much like the old myth about lobsters insects in this pure and simple form are medically immortal and do not stop growing. The circle of life generally sorts this out early on. But there are still truly massive insects out there. Sustaining themselves purely by the will to exist which exists about them. To get to this point they have to be mean and effective bastards. After a certain threshold of ambient will inhabiting them the spark of divinity is born (which can happen a multitude of ways, many humans worshiping the result of divinity sparking off inside of aetheric trees).

So for a medium giant insect you know that its been around for a very long time. Doing bug things really successfully. There are probably legends, it may be worshiped as some chaotic force of nature. If your lucky its exoskeleton isn't too thick for the setting's early firearms if you're not you'll want to not piss it off. If its a fully large giant insect you're now dealing with a living god of nature, and if you really have to kill it for whatever reason you'll want ship borne artillery because at that point it can probably warp reality to its basic thoughts.

They say a giant cricket lives on the skyland beneath the human world, on quite nights near the rim you might even hear it if you believe.

The PCs have been hired for a rather unusual job, by an equally unusual character. An eccentric breeder has made it his mission in life to breed and domesticate several strains of giant insects for use by society, as they possess not only immunity to a rampant strain of invasive cave mold that is incredibly toxic, but their waste products have properties that could be key to combating it's spread.

Of course, most people have dismissed him as a crackpot and this mold as an overblown nuisance, but hey, he's paying you!

Look up the defition of a city in I think it was iceland. One of the nordic countries in any case. Because you live in a pretty nice sized city by their reckoning.

That said if you're going to get upset with d&d about historical bullshitery the price list should be your go to.

>there's a BIG spider
>like it makes other big spiders look spider-sized next to it
>and if it gets you you're getting turned into a snackpack

>LotFP modules
never. Seriously the system was alright but these modules are... no.

Driders running a spiderweb farm.

Make them the next race of man. The children of the Outer Gods.

chestburst
I love saying that
chestburst

Step 1: Obox-Ob
Step 2: Anti-fun
Step 3: All the fucking abuse you can use with Worms that Walk, Hivenest Creatures, Vermin Lords, that one Template that turns anything into an Ant-variant of itself, Hivemind !notactually atemplate so it goes with Worms that walk in an even worse algamation of vermin
That one variant of vermin that fucks shit up, Swarm shifters, and other suck nasties which I may not recollect at this very moment.

You've got the Book of Vile Darkness, DM Demonomicon of Iggwilv (I think that one had Obox-Ob) Epic Level handbook or whichever one had the WTW, Insectoid creature template from a Dragon magazine, and I think there was some stuff in Savage species and a beetle people race.

>pressures about six times greater than those found in the deepest ocean trenches
Does that mean they are immune to bullets?

I'm envisioning a derpy, invincible tardigrade blundering into things clumsily. No one can stop it, but it's not hostile, it just tends to bust through walls because it smells food inside or otherwise causes destruction it is oblivious to.

> due to an international elf conspiracy.

A good reason to be ANGRY. ANGRY ABOUT ELVES!

Sounds like the first act of Rodan

>"b-baka! I meant to trip"
>"what're you doing bug-chan?!"
>"please be gentle"

...

You remember the crevice scene in the remake of King Kong? An entire ecology of giant organisms?

You make the entire world out of them. then as they go up in levels you introduce ankhegs, bulettes, and trendrilous, along with froghemoths, and other voracious and massive beasts. the final beasts are the draconic ones - wyvers, yrthak, behir, rhemoraz, and other giant monstrosities that are also vaguely intelligent.

The end game is letting them get out into the wider world, where the entire world if populated only by kaiju.

Do it user

Underrated

Wow that was unflinchingly brutal

>How can we make giant insects more important?
Think about the average summer. Think about how many insects find your way into your house. Now imagine all those insects being the size of a grizzly bear with agression to match.

Then ask yourself why the humans in your setting haven't killed themselves yet.

They have. Turns out hell is also giant bugs

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Make them deadly. A giant centipede for example would ruin your day. Have you seen how they catch their prey? I imagine an encounter with any giant insect wouldn't be a banal exchange like in every movie/game. Make the giant whatever it is treat you like it would a fly. Make them as proportionally fast as they already are, and give them the same characteristics they had as small insects. Instead of the giant spider rappelling down and hissing at someone, how about a guy walking down a dark corridor when he suddenly trips on some string. Before he knows it theres a giant thing wrapping him up and slinking away before he even got to see what it is. Theres a shooting stabbing pain in his back, but the shock of the attack, the gallons of venom working through his bloodstream, and the sheer pressure of his silk cocoon force him to suffer an agonizing and silent death.

Terrestrial Bobbit Worms!