Monster Monday: Giant Harvestman - The Daddy of all Longlegs

Today's Monster Monday is the giant harvestman, a gigantic arachnid whose long, spindly legs let it drop down from above without warning. A giant harvestman stalking through the woods on its tree-like legs might go completely unnoticed until its body swoops down to snatch a rider from his horse.

Harvestmen - better known as daddy longlegs (daddies longlegs?) - are common sights for us in our gardens and lawns. If you know any trivia about them, it is probably that they are not actually spiders or that they have very poisonous bites but their mouth parts are too small to be dangerous to humans. It is true that these oddball arachnids are not actually spiders - spiders have a distinct two-part body (the cephalothorax and the abdomen), while the cephalothorax and abdomen of harvestmen are fused into one mass. But their bites are not extremely poisonous; in fact, no species of harvestman has venom glands.

Aside from a ball-like body and a lack of venom, harvestmen also differ from spiders in a couple key ways. They have only two eyes, where spiders have - I think we can agree - far too many. Harvestmen do not spin silk and so can make no webs. Also, they can actually eat solid food. Spiders use poison to paralyze and liquefy their prey, wrap them up in their silk, and then suck the bug smoothie up with their gross mouthparts. Harvestmen are on no such juice cleanse. Their tearing pedipalps can rip off chunks of meat and swallow them whole - a rare ability amongst arachnids, and one that I am sure makes them a hit at parties. A less popular party trick they can do is secrete a stinky fluid from their scent glands to make them unappealing prey.

I have wanted to stat up a giant harvestman for a while, but their strange anatomy made that a challenge. Making them in the Gargantuan size category would be true to their actual size, but so much of that space is just open air because of their trademark long, spindly legs. As a compromise, I settled on a Large-sized body, with their legs not included in their size category but accounted for with special rules. If you are playing out a giant harvestman fight on a battlemap, you might use a Large-sized model as a stand-in for its head and eight coins as counters to represent the position of its legs. It might look something like this:

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2018 Jonah Bomgaars.

Monster Monday: Remipede - Venomous Centipede-like Crustacean

Today's Monster Monday is the remipede, a little-known variety of crustacean that has a long centipede-like body and venom-injecting pincers. In real life, these creatures are only a few centimeters long at most, but the three remipedes statted up below range from about a foot long to over ten feet.

Speleonectes tanumekes, via Wikimedia

Remipedes are so rarely observed that they were known from fossils before any living species were discovered. There are now seventeen known species from around the world. It was only in 2013 that it was discovered that remipedes used their syringe-like foreclaws to inject their prey with a combination of neurotoxin and digestive enzymes, making them the only known class of venomous crustaceans. Remipedes live in saltwater caves and saline aquifers, but of course the larger fantasy versions below roam out into coastal waters and even the open ocean.

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2018 Jonah Bomgaars.

Monster Monday: Giant Sea Slug, Stinging Mollusk of the Reefs

Today's Monster Monday is the giant sea slug or giant nudibranch. These colorful, poisonous, acid-spitting creatures lurk in reefs or the open sea, feeding on coral and giant jellyfish, occasionally swarming shipwrecks or attacking castaways.

Clockwise from top left: Nembrotha aurea, Berghia coerulescens, Glaucus atlanticus (sea swallow or blue dragon), and Hexabranchus sanguineus (Spanish dancer). Via Wikimedia.

Sea slugs are carnivorous shell-less mollusks, far more varied and colorful than the garden slugs with which we are all familiar. Some crawl along the seafloor, others - like Glaucus atlanticus - cling to the surface tension of the water, and still others - like the Spanish dancer - can ripple and undulate through the water. In nature, sea slugs become poisonous by absorbing the stinging cells of jellyfish and hydrozoans that they eat, thus turning their prey's defenses into their own.

Giant sea slugs, as statted up below, combine elements from many different real species of sea slug, except instead of being tiny they are ten feet long and capable of feeding on giant jellyfish and even humans.

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2018 Jonah Bomgaars.

Monster Monday: Whip Scorpion & Pseudoscorpion

Today's Monster Monday is all about things that are called scorpions but which aren't actually scorpions. Whip scorpions are arachnids that spray acid from their butts, and pseudoscorpions have poisonous claws but no tails. They are both really small, but because this is a fantasy RPG I made them big and threatening.

ARACHNOPHOBIA WARNING

This post contains pictures of arachnids. I know most arachnophobic people are okay with seeing scorpions but not okay with seeing spiders, but these guys fall somewhere in between on the spectrum. Personally, I cannot look at pictures of spiders, but for some reason I can see pictures of spider-like arachnids like harvestmen and solifugids with little discomfort. But still, these non-scorpions might be a little too spidery for some people. For the benefit of people scrolling through the main site, I will be putting the page break here instead of right before the stat blocks as I usually do. Click through for more information on these two rarely-discussed types of arachnids and to see pictures of them.

Monster Monday: Anomalocaris, Top Predator of the Cambrian Seas

Today's Monster Monday is anomalocaris, an odd-looking predator that moved through prehistoric waters with a row of oar-like fins, grasping prey in its barbed claws and drawing it in toward its circular mouth of serrated plates.  You can think of it as a 'dire shrimp'.

via Wikimedia

Life-restoration of anomalocaris

Anomalocaris is the world's first apex predator, dwarfing most other creatures of the Cambrian seas (541–485.4 million years ago).  Of course, it didn't take much to be the biggest back then - anomalocaris was about a meter long - so I've also included a giant anomalocaris the size of a rowboat that should prove to be more of a challenge for low-level adventurers.

It is certain that anomalocaris fed on soft-bodied animals like worms and pikaia (a free-swimming creature thought to be the ancestor of all vertebrates), but there is some debate as to whether it also ate hard-shelled creatures like trilobites.  Giant fossilized turds containing broken bits of trilobite exoskeleton seem to indicate that anomalocaris (or some predator almost as large) was eating trilobites, but some paleontologists have questioned whether anomalocaris' mouth parts were strong enough to crush such shells.  It may have subsisted on worms that it sucked out of the sea floor.  In any case, the anomalocarises statted up below are assumed to have strong mouth parts capable of gnawing on stalwart adventurers.

anomalocaris painting by Ratianidze, via Wikimedia

Anomalocaris, looking decidedly Lovecraftian

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2016 Jonah Bomgaars.

Monster Monday: Giant Tardigrade, Resilient Little Buggers

Today's Monster Monday is the giant tardigrade, a man-eating giant version of the tiny creature often studied for its incredible ability to survive extremes of pressure, temperature, or radiation.  Tardigrades can even survive in the vacuum of space.  But can they survive a group of low-level adventurers?

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Arnvida stops to examine the body.  Another desiccated sheep corpse, the same fist-sized holes punched into its flesh.  She looks back to the rest of the party to give a wordless acknowledgement of what they all know: something weird is killing Bolg's livestock.  But Perrin isn't paying attention.  He's staring to the west, mouth flapping dumbly, trying and failing to mouth some warning.  Arnvida follows his gaze to the stone well.  Two fat, trundling creatures - like pigs fashioned from a giant's toenail clippings - are clawing their way out on eight stubby legs, toothy tube-like mouths pulsing hungrily as if anticipating the adventurers' meat juices.  

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2016 Jonah Bomgaars.

Monster Monday: Mantis Shrimp - The Fastest Claws in the Sea

Today's Monster Monday is the giant mantis shrimp, a man-sized version of the little rainbow-colored tropical shrimp that can punch so fast they boil the water around their claws and create a shockwave, and whose eyes are so good they can see colors we can't even imagine.

photo by prilfish from Vienna, Austria, via Wikimedia

If you've been on the internet in the last few years, you may have noticed a growing interest in these fascinating, terrifying, badass little rainbow murder shrimp.  Now you can bring that interest to your gaming table!

photo by SSR2000, via Wikimedia

WHOA! THAT IS FREAKY!

The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is ©2015 Jonah Bomgaars.

Monster Monday: Giant Starfish

Today's Monster Monday is a two-fer: the giant starfish and the giant thorny starfish, two related creatures that won't fit in your average tidepool.  Use them in conjunction with the giant sea anemone for a surreal, slightly rubbery beach-party brawl!

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The OGL, PFSRD-compatible monster is available after the jump.
The following text in gold is available as Open Game Content under the OGL. Open Game Content is (C)2013 Jonah Bomgaars.