Ravager Worm CR 13
This semi-transparent worm writhes through the air, snapping its jaws with a sickening shriek.
NE Large aberration
Init +1; Senses blindsense (life) 20 ft.; Perception +23
DEFENSE HP 225
EAC 27; KAC 29
Fort +15; Ref +15; Will +12
Defensive Abilities incorporeal, breathless
OFFENSE
Speed 5 ft., fly 60 ft.
Melee bite +26 (3d12+19 Fo)
Multiattack 3 bites +23 (2d12+18 Fo)
Ranged shriek +23 (5d6+13 So)
Space 10 ft.; Reach 10 ft.
Offensive Abilities destructive passage, half real
Spell-Like Abilities (CL 13th)
At will-fear (DC 15)
STATISTICS
Str +6; Dex +1; Con +4; Int -1; Wis +8; Cha +0
Skills Intimidate +23, Stealth +23, Survival +28
Languages Aklo
SPECIAL ABILITIES
Destructive Passage (Su)
Though incorporeal, a ravager worm that passes through something leaves a wake of distortion and ruin. When a ravager worm passes through a creature the creature must make a DC 19 Fortitude save. On a failure, the creature takes 5d6 damage that is half force and half negative energy, while a successful save halves this damage. Unattended items, structures, and other terrain features take this damage automatically without a save.
Half Real (Su)
Ravager worms are capable of bringing subjective parts of themselves into physical existence. A ravager worm may make combat maneuvers and manipulate physical objects as if they were corporeal, but are otherwise considered incorporeal.
ECOLOGY
Environment any ruined (cites of pollution, abandoned cities, wrecked ships, etc.), any environment nearby the King of Worms.
Organization single, squirm (2-6)
The universe is full of frightening things. For every bright spot there’s an astral predators prowling a shipping lane, an undead abomination crawling from a grave, a fresh nightmare assembled in a laboratory. Most of these things can be avoided or contained, constrained by their habitats and available transportation. This isn’t the case for ravager worms. These cosmic menaces can be found worlds apart without any sign of how they got there, hunting men, women, and children alike.
A ravager worm can grow up to ten feet long, though their average weight is impossible to determine given their incorporeal nature. Their bodies are covered in segmented plates with coloration ranging from greys and browns to burnished oranges or dark purples. Their heads are nothing more or less than an arrangement of hooked mandibles and needle fangs ringed in beady eyes with no discernable top or bottom. This particular notability extends to their whole bodies, appearing to lack any sort of structure or feature that could distinguish flank from belly from back. For their part, ravager worms don’t seem to care about such matters, easily rotating so that what had been acting as a back becomes a side or a belly. More chaotically, this couples with their lack of adherence to gravity to allow them to instantly reorient to treat other directions as “down,” making their movements hard to predict. Those who have experience fighting them advise others to treat every fight with a ravager worm as if it were a zero-G environment, a not inaccurate assessment given how ravager worms show no changes in behavior when in an environment lacking gravity.
Ravager worms are cruel predators, with enough intelligence that this predation may in fact count as sadism. Their typical hunting method is to use their intangibility to move through an environment while within the ground or walls of a structure, relying on their lifesense to alert them to nearby prey. While this protects them from being seen from a distance, sharper senses can pick up on the distinctive sound of matter being warped and distorted as they pass through it, making this tactic more effective in areas with more competing sounds like cities. Once they’ve closed the distance to their prey they first strike by attempting to lunge through their prey and allowing their destructive passage to kill them quickly. If this proves insufficient they fall upon the creature with a frenzy of bites, relying on their shriek to pick off prey that manage to flee or remain out of reach.
While dangerous predators on their own, the true threat of ravager worms become apparent when they’re introduced to population centers. They hold an abject hatred for civilization and will go to any lengths to bring it low. Given their limited intelligence this most often takes toe form of simply hunting and killing as many sentient creatures as they can, reasoning that civilization can not continue without people. To this end they always prioritize killing adults over children, not because of any sense of mercy or restraint but because adults are capable of reproducing and thus setting back their progress. Their threat becomes more pronounced when there are multiple ravager worms as their low intelligence is mitigated as they begin brainstorming vindictive and cruel ideas to further their goals. These groups come up with ideas like hunting doctors and destroying hospitals to increase death tolls by cutting off medical aid, using their destructive passage to sabotage power plants and sanitation centers to spread infection and cut off communications, and leaving grotesque threats to the public to dissuade them from rebuilding what was destroyed or helping those they attack. This threat is slightly dissuaded by the fact that once ravager worms have successfully depopulated and area through murder or evacuation they will not move on, preferring to dwell in the ruined shell of the city they destroyed and bask in their success. Others will forgo targeting populating centers at all, moving directly to areas they know will not become civilized like areas of massive pollution, radiation zones, and other inhospitable areas, though they show a preference for areas ruined by the actions of sentient beings.
The few conversations held with ravager worms have shed light on their nature, though this information is not widely known. Ravager worms refer to themselves as messengers, servants of a servant who will see civilization wiped clean so that it does not interfere with a greater goal. The name of the being they serve varies depending on the translation from the aklo phrase, but the most commonly accepted version is “The King of Worms.” Attempts to inquire about this being has yielded only failures, but certain records show planetary civilizations crumble rapidly after an influx of ravager worms, faster than the worms themselves should be capable of. Whether this is coincidence, or a sign of their master’s passage remains a mystery, but certain groups have invested significance resources to determining the nature of this being, if it exists at all.
