ECOLOGY

Environment any underground
Organization solitary
Treasure none

Known on some worlds as dholes, bholes are among the largest of living creatures, wormlike leviathans of such size that few can claim to have seen one wholly from head to tail, and those who do tend toward madness and other afflictions that carry with them a heavy burden of doubt. The coloration of these creatures’ coiling bodies ranges widely—from darker blues and purples to paler grays, yellows, or bleached white—with a cavernous mouth consisting of long, bony jaws that extend and unfold from the creature’s head when it feeds.

Ecology

By all accounts, bholes are incredibly long-lived—those that exist in remote worlds or on other dimensions have done so for countless eons. The bholes themselves seem to have no interest in their history, perhaps as a result of their limited intellect, but by all accounts a bhole can live forever, barring death by violence. For a creature as immense and dangerous as a bhole, such conditions essentially amount to immortality.

Regions inhabited by bholes are always barren wastelands. What creatures survive there do so with a combination of stealth and speed, and even then they quickly learn to make themselves scarce when the telltale rumbling of an approaching bhole begins to shake the ground. Bholes themselves seem able to eat and digest anything and everything, and in time can reduce a huge area to a honeycombed network of immense tunnels. These regions swiftly collapse, leaving behind crumpled, rubble-filled pits of vast and terrifying size. Legends speak of entire worlds being reduced to rubble by bholes—they also tell of the danger of allowing these monsters into inhabited worlds, for their hunger is eternal, and a relatively small number of bholes can do incredible damage on a continental scale.

Encounters with Bholes

A typical bhole is only 30 feet wide, yet is hundreds of feet long and weighs thousands of tons. Combat with such immense monsters might present some challenges for games based around miniatures and play mats. When you include an encounter with a bhole in such a game, it might be best to describe the immense worm as extruding itself out of the earth to attack those nearby—if the bhole needs to move, it simply burrows to a new location, sticks out its head, and starts attacking new targets. Alternatively, you can treat the bhole’s head as its only actively dangerous portion. In this case, attacks directed at its immense body are irrelevant, with only those directed at its head (which consists of a 30-foot space) actually reducing its hit points. You might even run an encounter with a bhole using a truly enormous space on your Flip-Mat—a space of 100 feet or more, perhaps. This solution presents its own challenges, obviously, particularly if your gaming area lacks for space. Of course, if these options for handling immense monsters don’t sit well with you, the best solution is to simply downsize bholes in your game; assume they coil up on themselves and fit entirely into their 30-foot space, with their length accounting for their unusually enormous reach. Finally, you might consider not using miniatures at all for a fight against a bhole, with the assumption that once combat begins, the immense monster poses a significant threat to all in the area and that even several rounds of flight might not put a victim outside the monster’s reach. Pick the solution that works best for your style of game play; in the end, the point is that a fight with a bhole should be one that your players remember for a long time.