Fire Snake

[hcobb]

Fire snakes are almost always encountered sleeping when even a trained naturalist would need to closely examine to distinguish the fire snake from a twig, stick, branch or trunk of a giant fallen tree. (They come in various sizes, scale their ST to match the size.)

They are awoken when struck (roll damage against them) or put into a fire. At this point they ignite and their hex(es) are treated as a fire hex as per the spell. Any figure that isn't immune to poison and takes even one hit of actual damage from their bite will then suffer one more hit per turn until they make a 4/ST roll or get proper treatment. Count the poison from each bite separately and a critical failure on the saving throw adds another bite of poison effect that must be saved against separately. Bodies of figures killed by this poison catch fire and burn to ashes. Putting out the fire snake with water will put it back to sleep. (It takes a lot of water to put out a monster sized fire snake.)

In all other ways these are completely ordinary snakes. The wizard's guild dismisses the rumor that there may be a variation of the Staff to Snake spell and takes a dim view of wizards who insist on researching into this.