Wyrmlet

A "head" wyrmlet with two drones

As I mentioned in my first post, before it became exclusively Warhammer and 40K, the British magazine White Dwarf used to be a general gaming magazine featuring articles about D&D, Traveller, Middle-Earth, Warhammer and many others. A regular feature was the Fiend Factory, which showcased reader-created monsters.  Some of the classic monsters of D&D, including drow, githzerai and githyanki, began in these pages (though they really didn't become famous until they were compiled into the original Fiend Folio.  More on that in a later post).

Sadly, there were also many, many delightful oddballs that vanished into obscurity-- frequently without seeing any other attention beyond the few blurbs in White Dwarf.

One of my personal favorites is the Wyrmlet from WD #32, created by Peter Ryding.

A wyrmlet looks like a 3 inch tall, fleshy coin with segmented legs and arms.  The two "faces" of most wyrmlets are featureless except for a small, beaked mouth on one side and a circle of tiny suckers around the edges.  Wyrmlets use these suckers to link together, forming a longer, serpentine structure/creature called a "wyrmling".  A rare, elite class of wyrmlet with more complex facial features will form the head of this colonial organisms, though the head is not strictly necessary once the whole colony has linked up. While linked, each wyrmlet can vibrate its cartilaginous beak, the cumulative effect of which is a freaking disintegration ray if focused by the head! Though,  due to its frequency,  this ray only destroys metals.

One unfortunate problem with the Fiend Factory articles is that they rarely provide any ecological or behavioral information about the monsters-- partially, I'd imagine, because this was back when most RPGs were all about hack-and-slash dungeon crawling and number-crunching.  So there's no explanation as to why wyrmlets link up like this. 

This does, however, leave them a blank slate for me to fill in my own ideas. The wyrmlet's colonial habits, for instance, remind me of siphonophores-- close relatives of jellyfish that are actually formed from multiple, specialized jelly-creatures all linked together by a common digestive-system.  Well-known siphonophores include the Portuguese Man-O-War and the By-the-Wind Sailor.

 I'd imagine the individual wyrmlets are also similarly specialized.  The text even hints at this a little, with reference to the more complex "head" individuals, along with wyrmlets that are "mages" and "clerics".  Each wyrmlet is probably a highly-simplified being, specialized for fighting, digesting, waste filtering, sensory awareness, etc.  So specialized, in fact, that they cannot function on their own and must link up into the colonial wyrmling to form a full metabolism. 

"Sensory" and "Stomach" wyrmlets

Wyrmlet colonies subsist primarily on metals-- specifically particulate, oxidized metals.  Specialized sensory wyrmlets can detect faint traces of iron, copper and other minerals in soil and stone, which the wyrmling extracts using its disintegration ray. They will, of course,  eagerly attack sources of pure metal-- such as armor or weapons-- to obtain metals in a concentrated, purified form.

Wyrmlets live in complex, ant-like tunnels beneath temperate forests, slowly extracting metals from the soil.  This metal extraction alters the floral composition of the forest above, encouraging the growth of plants that can tolerate reduced soil metals.  Wyrmlet droppings-- which are almost entirely oxidized metals-- are fed upon by particular strains of bacteria which can eventually form large, slimy colonies on the surface that resemble Nostoc or "Witch's Butter".  Ecologists, foresters and rangers can detect the presence of wyrmlets based on this altered ecosystem. 

Wyrmlet art copied from a "newspaper rock" found in their territory.

Wyrmlets are not intelligent enough to create complex societies, though they are do know how to wield discarded weapons from pixies, fairies, brownies and other tiny forest dwellers.  They will even produce the occasional artwork on hard surfaces such as stone or wood.  The subjects of these works are usually ants, springtails, worms, moles, tardigrades and other subterranean organisms that they regularly encounter, but there are hints that the wyrmlets have a rudimentary concept of a "god" or at least invisible spirits who provide the metals they consume.