BX Monsters A to Z: Driver Ant

 Giant bugs are a staple of most editions of D&D, and B/X ix certainly no exception. Driver ants are, in my experience, an underutilized variety. I think my players encountered a few once in a random encounter very early in my DMing career, and then they never appeared again. The name "driver ant" itself seems to have appeared only in the Moldvay Basic set, with no similar creature appearing in Holmes, and reverting to the generic and less evocative "Ant, Giant" in Mentzer Basic (BECMI). I have to say I strongly prefer the Driver Ant label, as it evokes the relentlessness of the ants.

Driver ants are described as 6-foot-long black ants. At six feet in length, they'd stand about waist to shoulder-high on an average human, I'd imagine -- not quite sci-fi B movie scale, but still pretty terrifying. They're omnivorous, and when hungry, will devour anything edible in their path. I guess when the reaction roll indicates hostility, they're probably hungry; it doesn't necessarily call for an automatic attack, though. (The Mentzer Basic entry for Ant, Giant, in contrast, omits "When hungry" and further clarifies it with "no reaction roll.")

Driver ants are very tough and heavily armored, with AC 3 and 4 HD. Their huge mandibles inflict 2-12 points of damage with a successful attack. Even one of these creatures would be a deadly threat for a party of 1st to 3rd-level characters, but the Number Appearing for the dungeon is 2-8, so you're never going to be so fortunate as to only face a single ant. Their movement rate is frankly insane, with the ants skittering at a rate of 180'(60'), which means unless you're on unencumbered riding horses or you have some magical means of escape, the ants will run you down with relatively ease. 

Morale is given as "7 and see below" which refers to the ants' habit of always fighting to the death once engaged in combat, even crossing flames to reach their prey. It's unclear when that 7 would ever come into play, given that monster morale is only ever checked in B/X during combat or when determining if a monster will pursue fleeing characters, which in most instances implies previous combat (or else steps on the toes of the reaction roll, but that's another can of worms.) A possible way to get driver ants off your tail might be to throw food for them, assuming the previous passage in which they're stated to devour anything edible in their path supersedes, at least temporarily, their implacable aggression. Frankly, this is just a blatantly unfair encounter if it doesn't, because there's literally no way to escape otherwise.

The nests of driver ants are always guarded by 4-24 ants (the wilderness/lair Number Appearing) and will contain Treasure Type U, at least, with a 30% chance for 1-10 thousand gp worth of gold nuggets. That's potentially a pretty solid haul, but a very tough encounter even for Expert-level parties. Probably the best tactics would be to draw the ants out and incinerate them en masse with a fireball or similar magic, or to entrap them with web spells. Fighting them in melee is almost certainly a fool's gambit. 

A driver ant colony burrowing up in the middle of a village or farm would be a fair catastrophe, certainly something for which the terrified locals would appeal to adventurers for aid. With a little stretching of the monster description (or at least a certain judicious interpretation of what is and isn't edible to driver ants), a lair could constitute a dungeon in its own right, populated by "inedibles" like shriekers, slimes and oozes, other subterranean insects that have taken on the ants' scent, and the like, in addition to the ants themselves. 

We could probably safely assume that a species as aggressive as driver ants has no proper "soldier" caste, since they're essentially all soldiers, but it is curious that no stats have been provided for a queen. It's also noteworthy that, in a game with multiple sorts of giant beetles, spiders, lizards, and whatnot, there is only this single type of giant ants. No giant red ants with venomous bites? No relatively benign giant harvester ants? No giant carpenter ants boring their way through ancient dead trees? It seems a lot of territory has been left unexplored here.

As far as my wish list of changes to driver ants proper, I strongly believe the given movement rate is far too fleet, and ought to be reduced to a more reasonable 120'(40'). That's still equal to an unencumbered human, which makes it difficult but not impossible for an adventuring party to elude pursuit. I might drop damage per attack to 2-8 rather than 2-12, also. And let's get real and just make the monsters' morale 12, instead of this vestigial 7 with qualifiers that render it almost completely null and void. 


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