The Srik'Kr'Sril are a semi-intelligent race of ants that live in the extreme heat of the deserts, and the cool darkness of the night. Their name derives from the Tremederik tongue, and their encounters with the giant ants between the Prizm Wars and the Shaping Wars. The 'Srik' as they're more commonly called, disappeared for millennia, only to reappear during the War of the Undead. They can travel on four legs or six with equal speed, surveying their environment with sensitive scent detectors, motion-detecting antennae, tiny hairs that can sense vibration, and multi-faceted eyes. Agressively pursuing anything they see as nutricious food for their food-producing fungi, they thoroughly enjoy pork -- and the humanoids that taste like pork: men, elves, dwarves, and ograns in particular. Their sensitive equipment makes it difficult to surprise them, engendering them with a +2 bonus to their surprise rolls. Their desert coloration makes them difficult to detect, and their six legs spread their weight very well -- coupled with their speed, they are formidable opponents, difficult to spot until it's too late. Combat: The heavy salts and metals their fungi-food takes in makes their chitinous exoskeletons extraordinarily hard, giving them a base AC of 4. They attack by rearing up on their four rear legs, and striking with their front two -- then going in to bite with huge side-to-side crunching mandibles. The super-hard chitin of their exoskeletons lets their sword-like legs and mandibles do considerable slicing and puncturing damage. The muscle tissue underneath their exoskeleton gives them phenomenal strength and speed as well. They have an effective Strength of 20, and an effective Dexterity of 20. Their formidable power gives them a +8 bonus to their damage, and a +3 bonus to their To Hit scores. Each bite from a drone deals 1d8+8 points of damage, and each strike from their forward legs deals 1d6+8 points of damage. When pressed or determined to bring down a particularly large prey, they can rear back on just two legs, and impale prey with four legs at once. Though the female drones cannot, the males can fly. Though they sacrifice some weight in terms of armor, dropping their base AC to 5, they often make use of all six sword-like legs to attack, in addition to their lethal bites. And where the drones forage during the heat of day, the males forage during the cool of night. Often a distant buzzing is all that prey hears, before it is swept up and into the air. The males can fly with close to three-hundred pounds of weight, crossing distances of nearly twenty miles. For prey that prove troublesome, the males can hover just out of reach of fangs or claws, showering their victims with small debris. These miniature whirl-winds inflict 1d6 points of damage per round of exposure, blanketing an area twenty feet on a side. Creatures caught within the whirl-wind are blinded (-2 penalty to their THAC0), and rarely see the surprise attack from above until it is too late. When truly hard pressed, the males can spit an aeresol-like mist at an attacker. Victims can save vs breath weapon to avoid the mist; should they fail, the prey's eyes and other mucous membranes sting and burn, allowing the male to withdraw -- and report the encounter. The mist has an effective range of twenty feet, spreading over an area nearly twenty feet on a side. Another type of female hold the ground -- the warrior. Twice the size of the large drones, these huge ants are the real work horses among the Srik. They burrow through sand and softer rocks at a phenomenal rate, and can do the same to soft-tissued prey. Should anything prove too much for the drones, the alert goes out both sub-audibly and by scent. And then the warriors attack, defending the drones, and defending the nest. Stronger than either the drones or the males, their effective Strength is 23, giving them a +5 bonus to their attack rolls, and a +11 bonus to their slashing and piercing attacks. Armed with the same aeresol-like mist the males employ, the warriors use such to subdue their prey, though the effective range is nearly forty feet on a side. When a warrior is reduced to half its Hit Points, it puts out a special pheremone, and ceases to make biting attacks -- using its mandibles to create an ultra-low pitched subaudible hum that travels for miles. The pheremone and the hum attract all other insects within a dozen miles of the warrior, up to and including other Srik. Habitat/Society: The Srik'Kr'Sril agressively hunt in small forces, seeking out whatever food stuffs the desert might hide. Active burrowers, their network of underground caverns can extend for many miles away from the main nest. Semi-sentient, an over-queen rules over all the other queens in a region. Like the tiny ants for which they are named in the Tremederick tongue, the Srik respond to force with force. A queen will preferentially lay warrior eggs in situations where several generations of force stress the colony. Drones do the majority of the work, from tunneling to caring for the larvae, to foraging for the fungi that feed the nest. The larvae are helpless until their first molt, and grow to full size within a year; their nature depends on the status of the nest. Queens are much more intelligent than the drones or the warriors, and can achieve human-like strategy and intuition. The other members of the Srik obey her scent and subaudible commands as though given by the gods, and cannot fathom disobeying. The nests build up, as the tunnels are excavated. Usually the heart of the nest is built over an aquifer or underground river, so that it can provide water to both the fungi they live off of, and to the nest as a whole. The built-up nest is made of the same material as the desert, and is often indistinguishable from the hills or mountains nearby. During their growth seasons, the nest is relatively inactive, and few Srik might be seen about. One false step then can bring an entire swarm out to attack prey so close to the nest. Srik nests have many tunnels, all of which can accomodate the warriors. There are also several large caverns within the nests where the males can fly. The caverns serve different purposes -- farms, nursuries, cisterns, garbage pits, and the throne room. There are several smaller caverns in which the males rest. These smaller caverns have many tunnels leading in and out of them, and serve as the conditioning rooms for the air, letting the nest breath in and out in complex harmonies of scents and fresh oxygen. As well, some minor species can cohabit with the Srik Ecology: Though omnivorous, they prefer to dine on certain fungi that they grow within their cool, damp nests. The fungi grow off of the decomposing remains of whatever scraps the ants bring -- though the fungus grows best on specific plants and animals. The Srik can totally denude a region of all plants and animals, within a hundred miles of the nest. Once the local food sources for the fungus have been exhausted, the ants go into civil war. A new queen challenges the old with an army of hungry followers, and the winner feeds the loser to the funguses. In the interim, the desert rebounds, and the process starts all over again. A nest's many tunnels are aerated, with the fungi that feeds it at the deep heart of the nest. Other tunnels may branch off for miles away from the nest, aerating the desert and making it more fertile than before. Coupled with the nitrous waste that the Srik exude as a slime along their legs, they can be of great benefit to the desert when held in check by such creatures as elder hatori or even packs of slicer beetles. In addition, most nests feed off of only those things that would best feed the fungi they live on; only after those resources are exhausted, do other plants and animals become a food source. Previous Creature from the Creatures List |