Bombworm

Type

Vermin

Base HD

1

Terror

-4

Height (cm)

8 (length)

A common pest which sustains itself by feasting on garden vegetables, and presumably by eating other leaves when not infesting the gardens of hard-working villagers. They are around the size and length of a woman’s finger and they resemble a fat caterpillar except for being smooth and without an obvious head. Ridding a garden of bombworms (and other pests) is an important task that takes up many a morning of a child not old enough to be entrusted with more difficult or dangerous tasks.

Bombworms are soft, slow, not poisonous, and altogether nearly defenceless, and they are also easily spotted due to their bright red colour with yellow rings; however, they have almost no natural predators, because when a bombworm sustains severe trauma, like being bitten or pecked, it swells to four times its original size in every dimension and then detonates with a deafening bang that flings its innards in all directions. The blast is not powerful enough to severely injure creatures as large as Men but can easily cripple or kill a bird or host of ants, and can even injure a fox or juvenile wolf. The explosion of a bombworm does not however release a meaningful amount of heat despite the force of the blast. Because the creature explodes in all directions, there is little flesh left over to be eaten; therefore almost nothing hunts bombworms. Exploded bombworm innards that land on edible plant matter will soon become fresh bombworms so there are few ways to be permanently rid of the pests.

Bombworms are surprisingly useful because of their docility combined with the loud noise they make when killed. Dropping a heavy rock on a pouch of bombworms will startle most predators and a dozen bombworms going off at once is audible from quite far away, so children carry them when herding animals in the forest; they have a distinctive whistling lead-in to the explosion, and hearing many of those in succession from the same direction is a sure sign that someone is in trouble. Bombworms are also useful as dye; ground, dried flesh of a bombworm is one of the few ways to get a bright red, though it fades with sun and repeated washings. They can be safely killed by dropping them in water, where they drown readily; there are mass die-offs of the creatures with every rainstorm; conversely bombworm populations readily explode during a drought, at least until the leaves they eat begin to wilt. Bombworm flesh can in principle be eaten, but the taste is acrid and soapy and only the desperate will do so.