Welcome. Today, we delve back into the 1981 Fiend Folio to one of the strange monsters we have never heard from again, but there is a lot to learn about the weird relative of the Carrion Crawler, the Garbug. Created by Jonathan Jones, who also created the Volt and the Witherstench for the Fiend folio.
If I could sum them up in one simple phrase, that should strike fear into ANY experienced player. These things are FLYING JUNGLE CHUUL.
There is a solid bit of lore for these creatures, and I have a really good theory about their ecology and perhaps the origin of the dreaded Chuul as well, so grab yourself a tasty beverage and settle back; it's time to get deeply nerdy.
Found in dank and hot, humid environments, such as jungles, swamps, and underground caverns overgrown with fungus and often very difficult terrain, the Garbugs may not only be closely related to Carrion Crawlers, but they could easily be another stage in the dangerous vermin's life cycle, one that only occurs in just the right kind of environment.
Garbugs are not pleasant to look at, and they are also very clearly divided between the genders, with the males being a glossy black and the larger dominant females being a striking violet hue; they are not small; these nightmare bugs can grow up to six feet long for the males and nice feet long for the females with the bulk of an ox, though nowhere near the mass of one, like a huge mutant locust, their body has a lot of hollow parts to it and their respiratory system is also a mass of tubes and accordion style primitive lungs that pump air directly around their body. They share physiological traits with Mantis shrimps and lobsters, but also terrestrial arthropods and have body tissues and strange organs more like a jellyfish, so it is most likely that these creatures evolved on some other world or plane of existence entirely, being naturalized other-dimensional or alien monstrosities.
Garbugs resemble wasp-bodied lobsters with five pairs of limbs. They can fly in a cumbersome manner on flimsy wings but spend most of their time skittering around on six legs; they have two impressive-looking front pincers, but these are actually fairly weak in the males and a lot stronger in the females, and their six moist and loathsome mouth tentacles are far more dangerous, extending out to two feet and loaded with paralytic secretions.
They have short eyestalks and long antennae, and their exoskeleton is quite hard, often spiked in some places, with overlapping segments like plate armor.
The medium-sized male Garbug has a long proboscis and smaller pincers. The large female Garbug is a uniform violet of striking hue, except for the set of strong claws on her topmost pair of limbs; these are dark yellow; if she manages to grab hold of a victim with both claws in one round, she can apply her full strength to try and tear the target apart with a vicious rending bonus attack. The black male's proboscis is used to plunge into the body of a humanoid or often a Giant Spider to feed on the blood or other fluids inside, which is terrifying for a paralyzed victim, of course.
The males are quite voracious and will fight each other fiercely to feed on a paralyzed victim, which can work in their prey's favor if they manage to break free of the paralysis.
With another example of a monster that regularly hunts and feeds on giant spiders, it's nice to know that there are checks and balances in the forgotten realms and other fantasy worlds that keep such apex predators in check; even dragons have their parasites, diseases, and predators, let's not forget the formidable Behir, a species engineered by the giants to devastate the dragon species. Biological warfare is a crime many mages are eternally damned for, as once unleashed, they are nearly impossible to eradicate.
Talking of biological engineering, its long been known that the dreaded aberrations known as Chuul, which dwell in aquatic environments and often guard magical objects or locations are some sort of artificially created species, and when you look at the Garbugs and Carrion Crawlers, it seems pretty obvious that here we have the original monstrous creatures that were transformed through forbidden magics into the Chuul, those deadly paralytic tentacles are a dead giveaway and its deeply satisfying to me to have that logical connection, thanks to the sort of value-added world building and addition plots it unlocks, so, now you could have a laboratory with all three types of monster, along with whatever crazy bastard is trying to make Garbugs and Carrion crawlers even worse than they already are.
Garbugs dwell in warm and wet environments, though the males just roam around and rest wherever normally clinging to the underside of a large tree branch or to the side of a boulder or cave formation, the females tend to seek out a nesting site in a small cave or hollow, inside an ancient fallen log or other hollowed out space, even inside the ribs of some great beast long dead, they will line their nest with moss and rotting leaves, which composts and creates natural heat from its decomposition, this is purely for the female's comfort and has nothing to do with their breeding habits. Once or twice a year, Black garbugs use their proboscises to fight one another in dazzling aerial combat, trying to win the privilege of mating with a violet garbug. About a week after a strangely beautiful mating ritual, the violet female lays 20-40 eggs in standing water. These eggs hatch into nymphs, which look like crayfish but are colored according to sex.
The nymphs are quite active and feisty critters that are left to their own devices by the adult Garbugs, the adults don't nurture them and they don't eat them, the nymphs will eat each other if there is very little food in the water, in which case sometimes its just a single female who survives, quite often this will also cause the nymphs to try and venture outside of the water before they are fully developed, and this is where we have the origin of the Carrion Crawlers, where the water is very barren, or dries up, or has a predator which is going to eat all the nymphs, they will escape and remain in a state between the nymph and adult state, growing to adult size and able to breed, but never developing their full exoskeleton, pincers, proboscis or wings.
There are usually five or six males for every female. In two months, the nymphs undergo a metamorphosis, briefly taking on that bloated Carrion Crawler form, then swelling into a cocoon before emerging as full adults.
Garbugs do eat carrion at all stages of their life but do prefer to eat living paralyzed prey; the six tentacles are packed with stinging pods that fire a toxin-soaked filament harpoon into the flesh of whatever contacts the thousands of pods and sets them off, exactly the same mechanism used by jellyfish, though thankfully the toxin causes total numbness rather than horrible searing pain like you have been whipped by a balrog. This is the reason why the tentacles only cause a single point of damage on contact, if they crippled via pain it would probably be much higher damage. The toxic secretions of the tentacles are not just found in the stinging pods though, the whole length oozes the stuff and it is mildly corrosive, also serving a part in the digestive process of the Garbug, so if not washed off it will cause ongoing damage of one point per round as it sizzles away on exposed flesh.
Male garbugs use both the tentacles and their stabbing proboscis to feed. The feeding tube is left inside the victim as long as possible, draining blood, mostly, this causes ongoing damage of course and a swarm of garbugs is very tenacious, even fighting each other to get at prey, they will fight to the death even if there is plenty of other prey around, once they lock onto a target, they won't back off unless confronted by a wall of fire or a good illusion of the same sort of thing.
The violet garbug attacks with her tentacles and her strong claws. Once her victim is paralyzed or dead, she will use her claws to tear off hunks of flesh, which she slurps off with her tentacles and feeds into her other mouthparts.
Garbugs seldom live longer than five years and their breeding habits and aggression tend to keep the numbers in a swarm small, no more than 12 in an area, which would have to be very rich in prey species to support so many predators. Any sort of tropical feeling and overgrown place that also has Giant spiders around is likely to be a good spot to encounter Garbugs.
Why would you want to hunt after them?
Well, Garbug tentacles are very useful in the manufacture of magical inks for making scrolls or glyphs and of course the ingredients for potions and poisons of paralysis, there are a few substances like this but Garbug venom is particularly good and remains stable and viable for a long time. Also, If a female garbug is captured while still a nymph, she may be raised as a guard animal. A violet garbug nymph might bring as much as 1000 gold pieces from the right buyer. Females are smart enough to recognize individuals and can be trained to follow very simple, single-word commands, such as Stay or Fetch; the males are not able to be trained at all.
If you want a great combination for a quick encounter, I suggest combining a group of males and a single female, five or six males to every single female is normal; the females will conceal themselves within a patch of deadly Violet Fungus and the males will lurk in undergrowth or canopy branches, under giant mushroom caps and immersed in stagnant ponds, a perimeter with a few Shrieker fungus will set them into a hunting frenzy if they hear the screaming alarm sounds and the terrain will be uneven, slippery and those stagnant pools may also be loaded with vicious little nymphs that are happy to chew and stab at anyone who plunges a foot or falls into the stinking water. Patrons and channel members, you can find a full set of 5th edition stats for all of these on Patreon or the exclusive supporter's section on my Discord server.
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