A Surfeit of Centipedes

Almost fourteen years ago, I was complaining about the unusually large number of spiders I'd been encountering in and around my home. This year, it's centipedes, specifically house centipedes, which is immediately recognizable by their very long legs. As a species, house centipedes usually emerge from their various hiding places in the springtime, when temperatures start to rise. In my neck of the woods, the spring has been unusually cool and wet. This may explain why I've been running into these little beasts inside the house rather than just outside it.

After watching a centipede scurry into the darkness, its many legs rapidly undulating, I was reminded that giant centipedes are a longstanding monster in Dungeons & Dragons. They're mentioned by name in Volume 2 of OD&D under the header "insects or small animals," but they're not given a distinct entry. The Holmes Basic Set rectifies this. Its entry notes that "these nasty creatures are found nearly everywhere" and that "they are aggressive and rush forth to bite their prey, injecting poison into the wound." The centipedes I've been encountering are anything but aggressive; they flee at the slightest provocation, especially illumination. Like their larger D&D equivalents, house centipedes do possess a poisonous sting, roughly equivalent to a bee's sting in toxicity, hence Holmes's note that "this poison is weak and not fatal (add +4 to saving throw die roll)."

The AD&D Monster Manual describes giant centipedes in nearly identical terms to Holmes, presumably because they were in production alongside one another. Moldvay, meanwhile, ups the ante on the creature's poison: "Their bite does no damage, but the victim must save vs. Poison or become violently ill for 10 days. Characters who do not save move at ½ speed and will not be able to perform any other physical action." Ignoring its entomological error – centipedes don't bite; they sting – Moldvay's description makes giant centipedes a bit more of a genuine threat, akin to the other verminous monsters of D&D. 

I find it fascinating that AD&D 2e continues to boost the danger of giant centipedes, which it calls "loathsome, crawling arthropods that arouse almost universal disgust from all intelligent creatures (even other monsters)." 2e repeats the claim that giant centipedes bite rather than sting, but introduces the notion that, in doing so, it "inject[s] a paralytic poison." This poison "can paralyze a victim for 2–12 (2d6) hours, but is so weak that victims of a centipede bite are permitted a +4 bonus to their saving throw." 2e also introduces two more varieties of giant centipede – huge centipedes and megalocentipedes – to bedevil lower-level characters.

Unlike spiders, which do make me uncomfortable, centipedes, for all their legs, don't frighten me. Mind you, I might feel a bit differently if they were a foot or more long, like those in Dungeons & Dragons, and I saw this horrific visage bearing down on me.