Beetle, Chag (3pp)

A trio of exaggerated horns protrude from the crown of this massive beetle’s head and its six legs kick up a large amount of dust as it snorts aggressively.

ECOLOGY

Environment desert or temperate
Organization single, mated pair (1 chag bull and 1 chag cow), or herd (1 chag bull, 1 chag cow, and 2d6 drones)
Treasure none

Chag beetles roam the grasslands in sizable herds, searching for carrion and plant matter. When a mature herd finds a steady supply of food, the beetles revert to a territorial, hierarchical organization typical of many insectoid species.

They aggressively protect this territory, as well as their eggs and hatchlings. Despite their appearance, insectoid behavior, and immunity to mind-affecting effects, chag possess an intelligence equivalent to any warm-blooded animal. Chags mate for life, and newly born beetles depart as they mature to start their own herds. During mating season, unmated chag cows attract several bulls which battle one another by charging and tangling horns to win mating rights. The victor is the bull with its horns still intact after such clashes, and this ritual proves dangerous to anyone stumbling upon them as the beetles stop their singular combat to drive off or kill intruders.

Various races have domesticated these foul-tempered beetles and use them as a source of armor, tools, and food.

Expert scavengers can strip the chitinous shells protecting chags and fashion them into suits of armor retaining the chitin’s resistance to blows. Very few armorsmiths can retain the shell’s reflective qualities, however, but many smiths purposely dull the armor to ensure the wearers don’t make easy targets on the desert plain. Smaller plates and bull horns are more often fashioned into hammering tools or serrated into saws and other cutting implements. Thanks to the shell’s natural hardness, objects crafted from them can withstand a lot of wear before breaking. Despite these benefits, chag meat remains the most popular product harvested from chags. For those unaccustomed to the simultaneously chewy and greasy substance, it demands an acquired taste. However, the beetles’ carrion diets surprisingly do not taint the meat, and it proves quite filling. A widespread technique transforms the chag meat into jerky which greatly reduces the greasy quality, making it more palatable to offworlders.

Juvenile chags are 3 feet long, but weigh a very compact 150 pounds. The larger cows and bulls are 8 feet long, with cows weighing 500 pounds and bulls weighing nearly a ton.