Snake & Venomous Snake Swarms

“Asps.  Very dangerous.  …You go first.”

—A respected desert guide

Queetark the Hissing Heretic is a turban-wearing bugbear who wrestles in the pit at a bar known as Mog’s’s’s.  (Mog’s blue-scaled kobold stenographer is a zealous punctuator.)  Queetark signature move is to dump out a bag of snakes onto his downed opponents, to the crowd’s howls of delight.  The howls turn to howls of fear when someone substitutes a venomous snake swarm for the bugbear’s usual harmless one.

Snakes tend to swarm in autumn, hibernating in great clumps below the earth.  When adventurers head below ground to chase some snow goblins, they don’t notice the snakes nesting in fissure in the cave floor…unless of course, they use fire magic, which brings an excited swarm hissing out of the cracks.

Jungles elves have a game they like to force their savannah elf cousins (and other flatlanders, for that matter) to play called “Tying the Knot.”  The knot in questions is a comprised of a half dozen swarms of venomous asps, which must be herded into a chalk circle.  Questionable characters who succumb to the snakes’ venom awake to find themselves in dank oubliettes.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 3 249