DF: Loot for Giant Ants?

[Mister Negative]

What's a nugget of copper worth?

What might you find of value in a giant ant nest?

Why am I asking?

OK, so I have a player who loooooves ants. So, of course, I'm gonna make an adventure where he has to fight them. It's also part of my goal to run a DF game with at least one of every type of 'dungeon' covered in DF2.

This is the 'warren'. It's a nest of giant ants (accompanied by the required giant ant lion, giant fire beetles, giant centipede, giant spider, giant newt, and, for fun, giant crickets).

The main 'loot', for which the wizard's guild is paying mad cash, is the 'secret' of the giant ants. Insects don't just get big naturally, and it doesn't appear that a crazed wizard is responsible. The party will be able to find, deep within the nest, the chamber that holds the magical crystals responsible for the ants of unusual size. The crystals don't actually create the magical growth, but they form around this magical field (like water freezing around a seed crystal). Thus, the adventurers can't directly USE the magical 'growth' effect, but the crystals can be broken off, toted back, and sold to alchemists and wizards for gold (to be used in magical items and potions that cause growth).

There is also available some secondary loot, in the form of the toxin glands and poison sacs of the giant spiders and giant centipedes, as well as the volatile chemicals inside the 'fire' beetles (which are really just giant bombardier beetles), provided they can figure out a way to extract those without explosive results.

However, looking at it from the point of the party, there's not much 'real loot'. Nasty organs from inside some bugs, and some weird crystals. The party might even overlook the organs, if they are a bit slow on the uptake. I'd like to have some more traditional, or at least, more immediately obvious, loot for the freelance murder hoboes.

One idea was to have big nuggets of valuable ore. The ants are able to dig through the firm, clay soil to create their nest, but very hard rocks and metals must be carried outside the nest, as they cannot be pulverized. I even thought of having a fairly dense array of copper nodules outside the nest entrances. I've read that copper repels slugs (they don't like the sensation on contact), so this is how I'm explaining why the nearby Slughemoth doesn't just eat all the ants.

(The slughemoth is necessary, as if any reason was needed, so that the group doesn't just wait outside and pick off ants with missile weapons as they exit the nest. Any group smart enough to do that gets attacked by the Gigantic Slug!).

So, given the commendable realism of DF (the group was really impressed by the fact that they could take the Orcish spices and SELL them for more money than the crap weapons the orcs had), what would nodules of copper be worth? Is there any other interesting loot that you might suggest for a Giant Ant Nest?

(I thought, of course, of the belongings of a previous, less successful group of adventurers, but I've had no particular inspiration of WHO those poor souls would be. Any vivid (or funny) ideas?)

[jason taylor]

What about eggs?

[Greg 1]

Maybe they drag humanoid corpses, or parts thereof, back to the nest. If so, anything on the corpses might be left lying around.

[RyanW]

Parts of the ants themselves?

I can imagine quite a market for something like giant fire ant venom, for both its direct toxic effects and as an alchemical agent.

[b-dog]

Maybe the magical fields that made the crystals and the ants grow large might also make the ants want to hoard magical items because the magic items may strengthen the magical field? Maybe gold, silver and other precious metals and gems are good magical energy conductors and the ants want to stockpile those as well?

[whswhs]

Have you encountered Herodotus's story about the huge gold-hoarding ants to be found in Hindustan? I wrote up a version of them for GURPS Fantasy. You can find the original text at http://people.cs.uchicago.edu/~ravikant/Herodotus.htm .

Bill Stoddard

[Refplace]

They may also use metals to shore up sensitive areas.
And you can also use the ferret excuse.
They grab things for no real reason other then becasue they can. They then hide them in stash spots and hoard them. Get kind of cranky when you take them back to, even if it was your remote or hammer.
Yes, I had a ferret steal a hammer from me. Was amusing watching him haul it away while I was working.

[Lorka]

Large crystals! They fit into the warren, you can have huge crystals growing all over the place and while they might not be more than at most semi-precious they should be large and there should be a lot of them, they might have an additional effect in the cave.

So not only the magic crystals make giant ants they also make giant crystals.

Treasure that is big and cumbersome are always more fun.

[ErhnamDJ]

Ants build little ships don't they? Well, maybe these ants have built a giant-sized little ship for the rainy season. Maybe make it a magical ship. Then PCs will have fun trying to get that out of there.

As for the previous adventurers? They were obviously a party of coleopteran diplomats who had received some wrong information.

[Gold & Appel Inc]

Originally Posted by Mister Negative

(I thought, of course, of the belongings of a previous, less successful group of adventurers, but I've had no particular inspiration of WHO those poor souls would be. Any vivid (or funny) ideas?)

There is a dead Ogre, huge and fat, just starting to smell. It has a full suit of decent-quality SM +1 mail, a pretty standard one-handed axe, and a ripped-open backpack with some coins and empty food wrappings strewn about. Inside his bloated, rotting torso are hundreds and hundreds of giant ant larvae, ready to swarm out the second their home is disturbed.

The picked-clean skeleton of an unlucky Artificer, lying amidst tattered clothing and next to a mahogany strongbox containing a set of trap-disarming tools and several useful alchemical potions.

The bizarre, Gumby-like corpse of an Elder Spawn. The ants ripped the poor bastard apart, but did not find his rubbery flesh palatable, so his remains lay more-or-less recognizable in a few large, bloodless, man-shaped pieces. He wore leather armor, mostly intact, a large cloak, mostly not intact, and had lockpicking tools and a fine balance / material thrusting broadsword with a Penetrating Weapon (3) enchantment on it.

For some reason, I find the idea of a freshly-dead Fire-Infused character lying there with their head still on fire inherently hilarious. Feel free to draw your own conclusions about that. I had one in the kitchen in my recent Halloween dungeon, with an ornate, dwarven, fine balance / material silver mace, a mirrored medium shield, an ornate steel breastplate, and leather boots. His head could be severed and taken into dark areas as a light source if the party was ghoulish and desperate enough.