Goliath Stag & Slicer Beetles

Someone once quipped—Darwin gets the credit, but it was probably J.B.S. Haldane, as possibly glossed by Stephen Jay Gould—that the Creator “has an inordinate fondness for beetles.”  So if the Bestiary 2 wants to throw a few more beetles our way, who are we mere mortals to argue?

A common rock troll test of manhood involves heading unarmed into a slicer beetle warren and coming out alive.  The leader of a rock troll gang may demand other humanoids survive the test before he will parley with them.

A goliath stag beetle’s preferred habitat is a stretch of forest that has suffered a calamity, such as a lightning strike or fire, where displaced game is plentiful and the thinned-out underbrush makes its trample attack all the more effective.  A logging team finds this out the hard way, as every acre it clears attracts more of the Huge vermin, as well as inflaming the local nymphs against them.

In the pyramid-studded land of Mekhtar, the sun is said to be a giant scarab pushing a ball of fire through the sky, and the moon is a giant slicer beetle that takes bits off the corpse of the Queen of Evening as it wanes.  In a grisly homage, the Cult of Night in Mekhtar’s capital abducts its political and business rivals and deposits them in the caves outside the city to be devoured by slicer beetles.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 2 44

I heard Stephen Jay Gould speak once.  It was in college, where one does such things.

Backlog alert: I was so busy telling you about gold dragons yesterday I forgot to mention that I got the black dragon, brass dragon, and crawling hand/giant crawling hand entries up.