“ ’Will you walk into my parlor?’ said the Spider to the Fly.” ~ Mary Howitt (The Spider and the Fly, 1923)

Personally, I don’t know anyone that loves bugs and spiders.

I mean I know that there are scientists out there that get absolutely giddy at the sight of something with 6 or 8 legs skittering around. But I mean, aside from that, you don’t see most folks cuddling up to their favorite spider.

It’s not that I am afraid of bugs or anything, but I do have a healthy respect for them. Especially after living for a short stint in the “South”, where I had to contend with everything from teeny-tiny scorpions, to black widow spiders, to fire ants. Given that for most of my life prior to that, I lived in Ohio, and the worst thing I had to deal with was a daddy-longlegs, I got a quick and rather unpleasant education in the realities of nasty aggressive bugs! And don’t even get me started on “palmetto bugs”, as Southerners in the United States so quaintly call something that looks like a giant flying cockroach!

So now, when and if I do have to interact with bugs, my preference is to do so by watching Animal Planet, if I have a choice in the matter. But I also have to admit that bugs are fascinating critters, if creepy, and movies and books of all kinds have been cashing in on our mixed emotions of loathing and fascination for centuries.

Since the days of black-and-white film, Hollywood has been featuring giant bugs of all kinds terrorizing humans in an ironic twist of reality. From giant spiders stomping on towns, to huge ants dragging screaming heroines off to their nest, giant bugs definitely push our panic buttons.

Now Blackdirge Publishing provides a whole new set of creepy bugs to menace your heroes with in Blackdirge’s Bargain Bestiary – Baleful Bugs!

Blackdirge’s Bargain Bestiary – Baleful Bugs

• Designer: Aeryn “Blackdirge” Rudel
• Illustrations: Jesse Mohn
• Publisher: Blackdirge Publishing
• Year: 2009
• Media: PDF (7 pages)
• Price: $1.49

Blackdirge’s Bargain Bestiary – Baleful Bugs is a monster manual supplement providing five new Heroic and Paragon Tier monsters for use with any D&D 4e campaign. The bugs in the supplement range in level from Level 3 to Level 12, and provide a variety of threats to heroes from land, air, and even underground.

The production quality of Blackdirge’s Bargain Bestiary – Baleful Bugs is very good, with descriptions, lore, and stat blocks presented in a manner familiar to D&D 4e Dungeon Masters. Each horrid bug-monster is also presented with nice black-and-white illustration to give both Players and DMs a good idea of what the critter looks like.

Right from the Introduction, the Author of Blackdirge’s Bargain Bestiary – Baleful Bugs lets the Reader know what kinds of beasts lurk in between the supplement’s virtual pages:

The dark, dank, and deep places of the world abound with supersized insects, arachnids, and other chitinous horrors. Most of these monstrosities are no different than their smaller kin, being simply voracious predators driven purely by instinct. However, those that hail from other planes of existence may hide monstrous evil and a fell intellect in the body of a giant spider or other crawling terror.

The bug-monsters detailed in the supplement include a wide range of levels and roles to fit into many different types of scenarios:

• Carrion Fly Swarm Level 3 Skirmisher
• Scourgetail Scorpion Level 5 Skirmisher
• Giant Dragonfly Level 7 Skirmisher
• Sand Devil Level 9 Elite Lurker
• Puppeteer Spider Level 12 Elite Controller

It should be noted that the Author included an additional role for the Giant Dragonfly, beyond being a rather nasty skirmisher beast – they are often used by fey races as a mount! Given a decent flight speed, and some nasty aerial attacks, the Giant Dragonfly would make a very formidable war charger.

Besides the Giant Dragonfly, a couple of these giant Baleful Bugs deserve special mention. In particular, I really enjoyed the Sand Devil and the Puppeteer Spider, which have some really nasty capabilities.

The Sand Devil is an insect that actually exists in our own non-magical and mundane world, although very thankfully is merely a tiny critter, called an ant lion. But the Author took this tiny predator of ants, and created from it a very nasty desert-dwelling horror, that can drag hapless adventurers beneath the sand to meet a terrible end:

SAND DEVIL

Sand devils are huge insectoid monsters that live in deserts and other sandy environments. They often burrow up beneath their prey or create pits of shifting sand that carry prey into their waiting mandibles.

Description: The trackless dunes ahead suddenly erupt in a flurry of stinging grit, leaving a wide, inverted cone in the sand. Alarmingly, you find yourself unable to keep your feet, and you begin sliding down into the shifting pit. More alarming still is the gigantic insectoid horror waiting for you at the bottom of the pit, its huge mandibles spread wide in anticipation.

Thankfully, the Puppeteer Spider has no counter-part in our own mundane world, being an intelligent and resourceful fey-born spider. It uses a charm-based poison and a special type of webs to force heroes to blunder about the battlefield, invoking attacks of opportunity from the spider’s allies. Given its intelligence and Controller role, it has no problem finding fell allies from the Feywild to hunt with – such as bands of cyclops!

PUPPETEER SPIDER

The puppeteer spider is an evil and cunning monster from the Feywild. No simple beast, the puppeteer spider is an intelligent predator that often crosses into the world to hunt for prey.

Description: This giant spider is easily the size of a horse, and its chitinous body is a garish green and yellow. It regards you with half-a-dozen bright-red eyes that gleam with fell intellect.

I should mention one other entry in Blackdirge’s Bargain Bestiary – Baleful Bugs which is actually not a giant insect – the Carrion Fly Swarm. These biting, blood-drinking flies pose little threat singly, but when massed into a medium-sized swarm, can present a real danger to heroes, particularly when they accompany a pack of animated undead corpses!

Overall, I really enjoyed Blackdirge’s Bargain Bestiary – Baleful Bugs. The Author, once again, presents a good selection of nasty monsters that can be used in all manner of adventures. The price is very reasonable, and Dungeon Masters should have no trouble finding ways to terrify their heroes with these new creepy-crawlies.

So until next blog… I wish you Happy Gaming!

Editor’s Note: This Blog’s Author received a complimentary copy of the product in PDF format from which the review was written.

Tags: baleful bugs, blackdirge publishing, D&D 4e, monster, review

This entry was posted by Editor-in-Chief on Monday, January 25th, 2010 at 6:22 am and is filed under Dramatis Personae, Dungeonmasters' Insider, Monsters, RPG News & Reviews. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.