Loggerheaded Scut

Also Known as

Scut

Antus

Arachniod

Giant Terrifying Spider

Our rural communities that border our great forest often find themselves visited upon by unwelcome guests that emerge from the murky depths of our arboreal wildernesses. As humans expand their agricultural footprint into the vast woodlands of Udenland, new and unexpected creatures are revealed and disrupted. Some of these beasts simply take refuge deeper within the forest, finding it difficult to make peace with their new human neighbors. Other creatures become combative and defend their territory, sometimes successfully. Now having to reconsider their expansion plans, the farmer must come to terms with the entrenched beast and move on. And still other beast adapt to the situation, taking advantage of the new opportunities for food and shelter that human encroachment provides.

The Loggerheaded Scut has found itself in this very circumstance. Though they inhabit most of the great woodlands of Udenland, it is in the farming villages of East Canker County that the Scut has found itself in conflict with humans. Forced by recent increases in demand for grain from the cities, farmers have felt pressure to escalate their crop yield and expand their land holdings. This has meant an aggressive development of farmlands into the Forest of Ed which borders much of East Canker County and this development has stirred up large nests of the Loggerheaded Scut.

The Scut is a member of the Arachnapod family, in other words it is a spider, a very large spider, scary large. At fifteen feet tall it is one of the largest arachnids known to exist. Its brilliant color acts as a warning to anyone too thick not to have gotten the hint when they first saw a fifteen foot spider hanging from a tree.

Until the recent clashes in East Canker, seeing one was an unusual event, and if you did see one it was usually as you hung from one the massive and complicated webs the Loggerhead constructs in order to trap its prey. In other words you were food. The Loggerhead eats anything that is unfortunate enough to find itself caught in its web. In more remote areas of our woodlands one can find areas of grim stagnation, where the webs of the Loggerhead have enshrouded every tree and bush for acres, leaving the forest in perpetual darkness. These areas are usually bereft of life as the Scut has ingested every bit of fauna within these “dead zones”. Then in an ironic turn, the Scut must increase the size of its web in order to improve its chances at capturing food, mirroring the expansion of the farmers of East Canker.

Generally a solitary creature, it will seek a mate every four of five years. After mating, the female produces a single large egg which contains several hundred young. The parent Loggerhead will then put a great deal of distance between themselves and the egg sack, as a hundred recently hatched spiderlings can be extremely ravenous and no amount of parental love makes being eaten by your progeny a special family moment. In most cases the parent Scut affixes the egg to an unlucky animal large enough to be a food source for the spiderlings when they hatch. Not pleasant but, is part of the whole ”circle of life” thing everyone gets so excited about.

Eliminating or killing a Loggerhead Scut is no easy task, which is why the recent developments in East Canker are causing so many problems. The spiders have begun to infest the dwellings on the farms throughout the area. Families are forced to abandon their homes in fear of being eaten. The King has declared the situation a Royal Emergency and has sent knights and members of the magical community to the area in an attempt to eradicate the Scuts, to no avail.

The Loggerheads are discovering that the homes and barns in East Canker are perfect replacements for their lost habitats. The low ceilings of the rooms are well suited for their nests and burrows, and with a constant delicious supply of fresh knights and wizards, food seems to appear willingly at the doorstep.

Farmer Skank Thisby looks on in dismay at the infestation of scuts in his newly constructed home on his potato farm in East Canker county

An unfortunate byproduct of the farmer’s desperation is the growth of a new and disturbing industry; extreme pest control. With the failure of royally endorsed brute force and magic, farmers have begun to pool their meager funds in order to hire bands of mercenary exterminators with no respect for unique life forms like the Loggerheaded Scut. The worst example of this unscrupulous trade is Sarah Waxpoint and her gang of reprobates, professionally known as Monstrous Pest Removal. Through the use of dangerous hexes and high explosives Mrs.Waxpoint and her crew have left a path of destruction across East Canker that has caused far more carnage than any Scut could ever achieve.

Sarah Waxpoint and the insidious crew of Monstrous Pest Removal

Mrs. Waxpoint and others of her ilk, have set back years of goodwill that the Henchwood Guides has attempted to foster towards our bestial brethren. Their brutal tactics of creature eradication does not discriminate between genuine dangerous beast and those that are somewhat harmless. The aggressive nature of their methods have leveled neighborhoods in their pursuit of their intended victim, whether it is a sixty foot Fanged Hedge-Pig or a three inch Periwinkle Dragon. I can only hope, as a lover of all creatures, regardless of their toxicity, that the citizens of Udenland will see that the drastic practices of Monstrous Pest Control and similar enterprises, are a calamity of colossal proportions. By uniting we can put a halt to the Waxpionts of the world, and protect the deadly and kind-of deadly alike.

Farmer Skank Thisby looks on in dismay at the results of Monstrous Pest Removals extermination methods to his newly constructed home on his potato farm in East Canker County

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