A silk wyrm, which looks like a very large snake covered in a segmented green carapace, and whose grinning mouth is about three times as wide as its head.

The Lore

Silk Wyrms are snakelike monsters covered in chitinous carapaces. They’re gifted with many natural weapons: bites laced with paralytic venom and the psionic powers of flight, camouflage, and mesmerism.

Though incapable of communicating in humanoid languages they’re tenacious endurance predators who employ clever hunting strategies.

Silk Wyrms will shadow their intended prey for days, looking for a time when its guard is down. The book is not too specific about the nature of this prey. It could be an adventuring party, a traveling caravan with humanoids and several kinds of pack animal, or something like a pack of baazrags or other wild animals. What matters is that the prey is easy to hunt and can be eaten “fresh”, because silk wyrms apparently only eat their victims while they’re alive, and abandon them when they die.

When their intended targets are vulnerable, the silk wyrm will sneak in, paralyze a chosen victim, and devour them on the spot. If it manages to incapacitate more than one victim it will drag one of them to its nest, where it will trap them in silk strands and eat them over the course of the next few days while they’re still alive.

Silk wyrms band together as hatchlings, but as soon as they reach the adult stage their deeply antisocial instincts take over and they set off on their own to become lone hunters. Only after many years do they become wise enough to overcome this instinct and start allying with other creatures. Some manage to lead bands of their own younger kin, while others can ally with those creatures whose telepathy allows them to communicate with the wyrms and buy their service with easy food.

The Numbers

Silk Wyrms are Natural Magical Beasts with the Reptile tag and Low-Light Vision. All silk wyrms have a flight speed, but their flight is Clumsy, which means they have a -4 penalty to attacks and defenses while on the air. This means silk wyrms only fly to travel, but they prefer to fight on the ground.

We’ll look at their other traits in each stat block below.

Silk Wyrm Hatchling

Too frail to set out on their own, hatchlings roam the wastes in bands, spreading out to scout for prey and emitting a loud chirping noise when they find it to call their clutch-mates. They’re Medium-sized Level 3 Minion Skirmishers, with ground and flight speeds of 6.

Their Blood Scent trait means their attacks against bloodied creatures ignore concealment. These will mostly be bites that deal poison damage and slow for a turn. When the hatchling hits 0 HP, they release Silk Strands as a last attack, which deal a bit of acid damage and restrain (save ends).

Silk Wyrm Adult

In their “lone hunter” phase, adults are Large-sized Level 3 Solo Skirmishers with 174 HP. Their flight speed increases to 8, but remains clumsy.

Adults retain Blood Scent, which works exactly the same way. They will likely start the encounter in Shadow Form (minor, recharges when first bloodied), which makes Insubstantial with Phasing and gives them +5 to Stealth while stopping it from attacking. It can get out of this with a free action, and will do so shortly after springing its ambush.

Once the wyrm appears in the middle of its targets, and again whenever the power is charged, it will use Mesmerizing Dread (minor, recharge 4+), which deals psychic damage to enemies in a Close Burst 5, slides them 3 squares, and inflicts a -2 penalty to all defenses for a turn. Then it’s bite time.

Their bites deal more poison damage, since they’re not minions, and their venom becomes stronger. The target is slowed (save ends), which worsens to immobilized (save ends) on the first save and to helpless (save ends) on the second failure. Wyrm Strike lets it bite two different targets with one action.

Helpless is a funny and very worrying condition. It’s funny because going strictly by the book, you can move and act normally while Helpless. However you’re never just Helpless. The most common way to get this condition is to be unconscious. In this case, even on a strict reading you’ll still be Restrained when you fail your second save and become Helpless.

Being Helpless is worrying because it makes the victim grant combat advantage, and opens them up to the Coup de Grace action, which is an attack with any applicable power that auto-crits and kills the target outright if it deals more than their bloodied value in damage.

If the Silk Wyrm manages to get someone immobilized, restrained, or helpless, it will Feed on them, attacking their Fortitide eating one of their healing surges, and healing 10 HP. There’s no damage other than this, apparently, which makes this attack a lot more forgiving in a fight than it would otherwise seem.

It someone hits the adult wyrm with a melee or close attack, it can respond with Silk Strands as a reaction. This is a melee 3 attack vs. Reflex, dealing acid damage and restraining on a hit.

Silk Worm Elder

Elders have lived long enough to learn the value of teamwork despite or perhaps because of the loss of their ability to project silk strands in combat. They band together with one another or with other powerful allies in order to survive and keep eating. They’re Level 14 Skirmishers with 125 HP. Not being solos, they don’t have a blanked +5 on all saves, but they still have that bonus on saves against Immobilized or Slowed.

Shadow Form and Mesmerizing Dread work exactly the same, with Shadow Form just making the wyrm Weakened instead of preventing attacks entirely. They can only bite once per turn but their venom remains as potent as the adult’s.

The problem here is the damage: both Mesmerizing Dread and the basic bite do exactly the same damage as the adult’s, which is way, way below what it should be for a level 14 monster.

Feed, on the other hand, does a huge chunk of physical damage (5d10+6) in addition to deleting a healing surge. It recharges when first bloodied instead of being at-will, but it no longer has any target restictions. They still really want to use this in a helpless target if they can, because it’s going to kill any helpless target with 112 maximum HP or less.

Still, outside of their one or two uses of Feed, elders are significantly less scary. The venom is still a concern, particularly if they have heavy hitters with them, but barring errata it seems to me elders were made to rush in, use Feed once or twice, and escape the fight using Shadow Form and Serpent Strike, which they still have.

Encounters and Final Impressions

I think the Lore section outlines possible silk wyrm encounters pretty well.

Mechanically, the first two seem okay to me, but the elder is weird. The damage of their bites and Mesmerizing stare needs a buff. It’d make them more consistently dangerous despite making their Feed attack a little less impressive in comparison (as its 28 average damage is not a lot higher than the 22 their bites would need).