Across the arid grasslands crawls a terrible creature. A long,
armored body like a scorpion, decked with graceful locust wings and armed with four wicked looking claws, it bear the crown of doom upon its head: a buzzing, chittering halo of vermin. Its wing beats are the droning song of famine, and behind it follows a cloud of hunger. It is the vermiurge, and it is implacable. Vermin God. If the stinging creatures of the world have a god, it would be the vermiurge. This large, scuttling monstrosity wanders the wastes of the world, attended at all times by a swarm of its most loyal worshipers, whose cries of adulation are a hideous buzzing. Though intelligent, a vermiurge's intelligence is completely alien, being more akin to the intelligence of a swarm of locusts. It has no concept of good or evil. It may answer the prayers of an ant colony by slaying a nearby family of halflings, while a wasp nest that it encounters may be devoured by it without hesitation. Occasionally it may venture into the more populated realms of the world, bringing with it massive swarms of voracious insects, leaving only devastation in its path. Wisdom of the Waste. The vermiurge is a spirit of nature, and as such it understands much of the hidden knowledge of the world. It knows the secret language of the scorpions and sees the private, intimate lives of the ants. It understands why the locusts swarm and it hears the silent songs of the spiders as they weave their webs. Druids may seek them out to learn the truth of famine and the cruel indifference of nature, though they do so at their own risk, as knowledge does not come without sacrifice. The vermiurge is considered a demigod by many isolated tribes of thri-kreen and aldani, who worship the vermiurge in the hopes that it will spare them.