Wandering Monsters: "Nuisance" Bugs

The past few years we've had Asian tiger mosquitoes where I live. They're nasty, in that they bite during daylight hours and aren't weak flyers, so you can be in the sunlight on a breezy day and get bitten many times. They're not always completely dissuaded by bug repellent, either - miss a spot and they'll find it, miss your clothes and they'll get under them.

For adventurers, such annoyances are usually that. Maybe a mention in some boxed text, a throwaway line in a description, a mention here or there by the GM. When they come up in fiction, heroes generally get bitten by bugs when they're waiting patiently for their prey, ignoring it stoically. They don't get an allergic reaction, they don't get disease, they don't itch until they bleed, they don't do something stupid because they're so distracted by irritation they make a bad decision. Nuisance bugs are a signal for being a badass, like not blinking or flinching, or going without food and water while they maintain their preternatural strength.

So why not make that an encounter? Oh sure, you've got plate armor on over mail and your greathelm is on. A dog-sized spider might be able to punch a hole in leather armor and deliver venom that can kill a man in seconds. But against heavy armor, it's helpless. But a tiny spider - the size of a fingernail - can crawl into armor and bite you. Some of them can deliver venom that won't kill you in seconds but it might kill you in hours. Fleas won't kill you but they carry disease and their bites really itch. All the armor in the world won't keep the bedbugs out or ticks from working their way in.*

Wandering Itch Table

In my Lost City campaign, my random tables including these entries:

3-Nuisance Bugs (1d-4 FP, plus HT roll to avoid Jungle Rot at -2 to +3 based on roll.)*
4-Nuisance animals (rats, army ants, fire ants, spiders, snakes, etc. cause 1 hour delay)

* Roll another 1d. On a 1, a potentially lethal insect is encountered. HT roll or suffer 1d6-3 HP of injury (min 1), -1 DX per 3 points of injury; cyclic, 1 hour, 12 cycles. Critical failure does maximum damage for that cycle and all following cycles.

If that doesn't quite make sense, the die roll for the bugs causes 0-2 FP loss. Jungle rot resistance is based on the same roll. 1 = 0 FP loss and HT at +3, 2 = 0 FP loss and +2, etc. up to 2 FP loss and -2 on the roll. Basically it's 4-die roll.

That alone right there is all you need to play them in one fashion - as just travel hazard - but we can go one better, and provide some additional details and other methods of use.

Nuisance Bugs

Roll randomly for how many characters are affected (or just apply to everyone, if the circumstances make sense), and apply any effects. I'm not a big fan of allowing defense rolls, stat checks, etc. to totally avoid these effects . . . you can mitigate them (sometimes down to zero) but not make a roll to totally avoid the effects.

These generally result in one or more of the following effects:

FP loss - blood drain and the irritation and swatting and movements to get that damn bug out of my ear holes in my helmet causes fatigue. 1d6-4 (min 0) is fine; most of the time it's not significant but it can be.

Disease - HT rolls to avoid a disease effect, either immediately or later on, is common. Just in the real world you have malaria, zika, dengue fever, lyme disease, and bubonic plague. Nevermind the Dwarven Sprue, jungle rot, the purple shakes, mummy rot (from undead bugs!), etc.

Itchiness - lasts anywhere from 1 hour to 2-3 days, unless you have a nasty reaction to it. Either a HT roll with margin of success reducing effects and margin of failure increasing them - or just the duration - you can have itchiness.

Pain - especially appropriate for be stings.

Venom - like FP loss, a scaled approach to venom makes sense. The lucky delver who only gets a couple of bites or stings vs. the one who gets dozens. Find a poison with sufficiently mild effects that you can scale up, and have at it.

Distraction - fighting with mosquitoes in your face, gnats in your mouth and eyes, and flies in your ears is distracting. -1 to -3 to all rolls, depending on how distracting, can be a game changer.

Smell - Some bugs spray musks which will make you smell bad . . . annoying, and attracts more attention to you as it always messes up your ability to smell.

Damaged gear - some bugs won't bother you, but bother your stuff. Ants getting into your rations, say, or fantasy speed termites into your weapons, etc.

Figure out what kind of bugs you want to deploy, and if the encounter is with a lot of them (you've stumbled on a bald-faced hornet nest) or a small number (you've come across a few scattered ticks in the grass) or a single one (a brown recluse drops onto someone.)

Not all of these have to have noticeable effects, either. PCs might come across them and not notice until later - when they've picked up some ticks, or gotten leaches on them on everything not sufficiently covered (or down into their boots and socks), or find ants have gotten into their food, or find they have fleas.

Think of the fun, here - fighting, say, lizardfolk in a swamp (-2 to attack, -1 to defend for bad footing), while you suffer distracting bug swarms (say, -2 to all rolls) and the FP-sapping effects of their itchy bites . . . while the lizardfolk are at -0 due to native DR and Terrain Adaptation (Swamp) . . . suddenly they're more of a match.

Problems

You can make them a bigger issue - or just a bigger nuisance - in terms of size. Entry 5 on my wandering monster chart is that, really. Nothing that can be a big issue, just something that kills time or takes some effort. Of course, you can always make them an issue.

These can be bug swarms if you want a combat.

These can be bug hordes if you want a bigger combat, or just an obstacle to wait out. Like army ants going by, or coming across a mass of spider webs or having parachute spiders drop into them (possibly harmless, possibly not).

Perhaps PCs will willingly stomp through and take any consequences, but pack animals or guard dogs or henchmen might not feel the same way . . . and require Animals Handling or Loyalty checks (see DF15) to continue.


Too Tough to Itch?

As mentioned before, fictional heroes - and thus cinematic heroes - don't seem to itch or flinch from bites. Halo round their heads, too tough to die - but how to be tough to itch?

So what would help you be that guy?

Will rolls, with penalties for especially bad stings and bites - are a good way to go. Margin of failure can be used as a negative

(And no, because I have a player that will ask, margin of success doesn't provide a bonus. You're never better off for having resisted a potential negative than for not having that negative in the first place.)

High Pain Threshold will help with pain - stings and bites. But it won't help with itchiness, distraction, etc.

Single-Minded will give its bonus to any rolls to avoid distraction. Stubborness will not help - it just means you'll likely keep trying even as penalties pile up.

There is a lot of magic to help with bugs, but I'll leave it up to my players and yours to discover what spells really do help deal with blundering into a cloud of disease-carrying mosquitoes or keep the black widows out of your wizard robes.

(And because I have players who will argue, Purify Air won't remove bugs from the air, and flying bugs are not subject to Missile Shield or Umbrella, and Lifebane might kill bugs but they always get to bite you, first, and now you're infested with dead fleas and lice, which isn't all that much nicer.)




* Weirdest tick problem I ever had was one on my hip . . . under a tucked-in t-shirt, under long pants, under a button-down shirt over it. It may have crawled up from my boots, past my tucked-in pants, past my socks, and worked its way up to my hip. All in the hour I was out fishing. So I'm not convinced steel plates are going to keep them out.