Friday, May 5, 2023

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.

12 comments:

  1. Centipedes don't have stings. They bite, same as spiders: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centipede_bite

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. According to that link, "such a wound is not strictly speaking a bite, as the forcipules are a modified first pair of legs rather than true mouthparts." But I suppose it's ultimately a matter of how pedantic one wishes to be about terminology.

      Delete
  2. They were a fun Monster to fill out a d100 Table on with my Monster Encounter Activities: Giant Centipede. I've always liked including them in my Dungeons.

    ReplyDelete
  3. I rather liked 4e's take on centipedes (at least some varieties of them) where they leaned into their creepy scuttling movement as a signature trait. In addition to the expected wall-crawling stuff, they could shift 20' as a move action (so not drawing attacks of opportunity) and any square with an ally in it (like, say, other centipedes) was free movement. So if you had a bunch of the fool things they could cover a lot more ground by crawling all over each other in a carpet of scuttling vermin. We had a player have to walk away from the table just from visualizing what it would have looked like in person.

    Around here it's mostly been spiders this year. Seeing a much wider variety of species than usual too. I don't mind them, they keep the other bug populations down even if some of them mostly prey on each other. As long as they stay out of my way they're welcome to cohabitate, but anyone I catch spinning a web gets flattened. Not many of them, though. Mostly wolf spiders and similar leapers.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Centipedes creep me out far more than do spiders.

    ReplyDelete
  5. The good thing about house centipedes is that they come apart really easily when swatted or even lightly batted. Since they eat other bugs, I used to leave them alone unless I had someone coming over. I've only seen house centipedes in Chicago, but they were very common there.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. In Italy the house centipedes are called "fortuna" (luck), because they hunt and killer other house vermins more annoying like gnats, cockroaches and the like.

      Delete
  6. When I first started writing my apartment was infested with the critters. Scurrying along at very high speed for a bug, exploding in an icky mass of legs and bits if killed, they definitely creeped me out. I used a centipede-like aliens as baddies in a BESM game. The D&D centipede has usually been a standard go-to low level monster as well as something to fill in the lower rungs of dungeon ecosystems for other things to eat. I usually like the standard AD&D version - save or die but at +4 to the saving throw. Rarely kills anything above the starting levels, but still scary enough to make them something you want to avoid.

    ReplyDelete
  7. Still, having centipedes bite rather than sting is probably as not as bad the Runequest 2 error of having scorpions lay eggs... (Or maybe they do on Glorantha, much as bronze is a metal there rather than an alloy...)

    ReplyDelete
  8. I like them - easy trainer monsters for new players and not fatal in BX. I also like OA's spirit centipedes, as they're more unusual and powerful and talk!

    ReplyDelete
  9. Only marginally D&D related: As teenagers we used to camp by a medium-sized pond and I got bit/stung/kissed by a 4" centipede on my left arm while sleeping. The resulting sensation was a disorienting all-over (my arm) creeping feeling totally unlike a snake or spider bite and much more unnerving than even horrific rabies shots in the stomach. Nearly impossible to illustrate properly. Later I dated a girl named Carrie. When we broke up - never date a girl with a bitchy sister, it can't go well - I must have called her Carrion Crawler for six months.

    ReplyDelete
  10. The Centipede, Ogden Nash

    I objurgate the centipede,
    A bug we do not really need.
    At sleepy-time he beats a path
    Straight to the bedroom or the bath.
    You always wallop where he's not,
    Or, if he is, he makes a spot.

    ReplyDelete