Kyuss Worms, evil? Undead? Detectable?


Age of Worms Adventure Path

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder Battles Case Subscriber

This question may have been answered already, but I could not find it anywhere. Are the Kyuss Worms chaotic evil like the Spawn of Kyuss? Are they undead? Would protection from any of the above have an impact on their ability to be able to burrow into a victim and if so, how? Finally the big one for my party, if one was to cast detect evil, (or detect undead) let's say on a black dragon's egg or random lizard folk would it be detectable?


Kyuss worms are vermin. I would rule that, as vermin, they are always true neutral.

However, the rules are against me on this one. I was about to send this post in, when i checked out issue 130 and found that overworms and wormswarms, while they are unintelligent vermin, are also Chaotic Evil.


In our campaign the worms are neutral vermin, not undead, so the protections you describe are ineffective. However since they do transform the recently dead into undead via their INT drain ability, I rule that they emanate necromantic magic if detect magic was cast. Just my 2 cents... ;-)


there is a Kyuss thread fairly recently; I know I posted on it; if you cant find it any other way I think you can click on my picture and look at all my posts and look for what about Kyuss; were were talking about this very thing was pretty good thread.

Liberty's Edge

Valegrim may be referring to this recent thread that has links to other previous discussions on the nature of Kyuss Worms.

Grand Lodge

Pathfinder Battles Case Subscriber
Rexx wrote:
Valegrim may be referring to this recent thread that has links to other previous discussions on the nature of Kyuss Worms.

Thanks to both of you! That thread, though short, helped a bit. In issue #336 Dragon has an ecology on the Spawn of Kyuss and states; "The green worms that infest each spawn of Kyuss are not themselves undead. Rather, they are a strange symbiotic from of vermin that subsists on the decaying flesh of he psawn."

So that just nixes the detect undead. What about alignment? If as Delffed said isue 130 says they are chaotic evil then would that radiate in a host? And would they radiate necro? Thoughts? Opinions? Interpretations?


Reading the spell description for detect evil it says:

1st Round: Presence or absence of evil.
2nd Round: Number of evil auras (creatures,
objects, or spells) in the area and the
power of the most potent evil aura present.
3rd Round: The power and location of
each aura. If an aura is outside your line of
sight, then you discern its direction but
not its exact location.
The spell can penetrate barriers,
but 1 foot of stone, 1 inch of common
metal, a thin sheet of lead, or 3 feet of
wood or dirt blocks it.

So I would say given three rounds, and no armor in the way, a spell caster could detect the worm, giving off at least it's own faint chaotic evil aura. Then walking around a particular target, a living being, it would be identifiable but you would not be able to "locate" the exact location

Liberty's Edge

John Wood wrote:

Reading the spell description for detect evil it says:

See PHB

So I would say given three rounds, and no armor in the way, a spell caster could detect the worm, giving off at least it's own faint chaotic evil aura. Then walking around a particular target, a living being, it would be identifiable but you would not be able to "locate" the exact location

Well, you could argue that with three ten foot poles, you should be able to triangulate the location of the worm using detect evil. Break the body into quadrants and you could potentially know left/right/fore/aft in an arm/torso/skull. Generally speaking, the speed that a Kyuss worm reaches the brain makes such investigation moot and by that point the victim should be experiencing the Madness of Kyuss before succumbing to (un)death.

The presence of a slow worm in a potion should be noticed by a detect evil but the likeliness of PCs having such actions as part of their potion ID S.O.P. is doubtful.


My ruling will be that kyuss worms, as a consequence of their unique breeding by Kyuss himself, are unaffected by both positive and negative energy. This will stop canny players from using their new Pathfinder-specific "god grenade" clerics to completely eliminate the threat.


Under PF rules, Kyuss worms don't have enough HD to register under Detect Evil. Their other incarnations do (overworm, wormswarms), but individually, they are undetectable. Detect Undead doesn't get them either, they are vermin before the "transformation" of their host and after. Personally, I would allow negative energy to effect them since they are vermin and also are riding around on something that can only be hurt by positive energy. Unless everyone's got Selective Channeling, the dynamic of having to worry about healing Spawn and killing worms could prove interesting.


I don't care about channeling hindering spawn of kyuss. The issue is it being used to serve as an instant Remove Disease. Sure, the damage is annoying, but a couple jabs with the ol' stick of CLW and you're back to full anyways. The worms lose a lot of their threat when you don't even need a remove disease to extract them.

Oh, also, you can only heal or harm with channel. You can't both heal undead and harm worms, nor can you both harm undead and heal the living.


I mean, what are you gonna choose? Take 2d6 damage and get rid of all worms instantly (heck, doesn't even matter if the entire party's infested if you do this!)? Or prepare remove disease many times so you can get a slower-working effect that requires you to enter the fray?

Throw in the fact that almost any cleric with sense will try to pick up Selective Channel pretty fast, and the fact that by RAW, channel would instantly reduce any spawns of kyuss to mere zombies, and it becomes a no-"brainer". Don't let channel affect the worms or it will f#*+ up any threat they were meant to pose.


It depends on how you are treating the worms. If you treat them like the ones from the Rot Grub Swarm, then the rule of doing 5 pts of damage would deal with them and you are faced with the above conundrum.
However, if ran them as you would either Ear Seekers or Rot Grub Infestations (GMG p244-245), there is nothing in the text of either saying that area of effects deal with the creatures. The worms are inside the bodies of their hosts, having total cover and concealment from all effects. Its for this reason that even if you fireball your infested allies or cast any spell that affects all living creatures in a radius, the infestation isn't part of it. For a case of precedent, look at the encounters with the Swords of Kyuss in The Spire of Lomg Shadows. They freely use their negative energy fireballs, even on infested PCs. Channeling would follow the same rules. I'm aware that Bestiary 3 came out after the GMG, but I think that the mechanics of the swarm are to account for the doubled amount of ability damage and the added complication of being potentially nauseated instead of being able to deal with it.
Alternatively, what do you use for the CL check required on Remove Disease? Same DC as Kyuss's Gift (which is a disease), and would you make the DC scale based on the source of the infestation? (I could see a CL 20 for the Sea of Worms in SoLS and the Wormdoors in ItWF)

The channeling bit I get, I'm running Carrion Crown with where one PC is a Dhampir and another is an Oracle of Life (that channels a lot). It took a few sessions for everyone to figure out that she never needed to exclude the Dhampir when channeling to heal.


I believe one point of damage is required to kill the average kyuss worm. I'd have to double-check my Dragon magazine, though.


Depending on how the kyuss worms are encountered, I tell my players they could be Undead (when part of the Spawn of Kyuss), Vermin (when encountered as part of the wormswarms), a Disease, or a Curse. It is such a part of Chaos, that it could be any one of those, or be considered all of them.

When they are part of a Spawn of Kyuss, they are undead, but not separate undead. The nature of the Curse means as long as the Spawn survives, there will be worms. They cannot be attacked individually or separately. Once a worm has left the Spawn and is inside a new host, it is effectively both a Curse and a Disease.

The worms cannot usually survive on their own. However, in places effectively under a Curse, such as the Spire of Long Shadows, there could be wormswarms which would be considered Vermin.

The bizarre nature of the kyuss worms makes it very terrifying to my PCs.


What about paladins and their immunity to disease?

It is a vermin, but killed as soon a remove disease is cast.....


I believe the general consensus has been that it doesn't render them immune. It's not a disease any more than it is a curse, just something that remove disease and remove curse work on.


There's an interesting little sidebar about infestations on p. 24 of the Numeria sourcebook for the PF campaign setting.

According it that, infestations can only be cured by specific means (including a successful Remove Disease). Immunity to Disease does not protect against infestations (therefore Paladins can get infestations). Androids can get infestations. Undead and other "unliving creatures" (Contructs? Elementals?) cannot be afflicted by infestations.


Thanks bellano and kobold Cleaver. I was afraid this would really help the paladin but now i know that he will be equally screwed.

Wha ha ha (dm maniacal laughter)

Scarab Sages

I discussed the paladin immunity to disease with my player, when he picked the class, advising him that it may not be infallible, given comments on the boards by staff and writers.
In our case, I knew the player had a basic knowledge of who the main BBEG would be. Not because they'd cheated, but because of major spoilers on the covers of the mags. So I didn't want to reward that foreknowledge by making the PC totally immune to many of the common opponents, but I believed a paladin's disease resistance ought to provide some protection.

What I rationalised was that the paladin's body would wash itself in a free-action remove disease effect every round. The spell had been reduced in effectiveness, to require a caster level check, but given the long incubation periods of most diseases, this wasn't a problem, since the PC would have effectively 'taken 20' on the check, flushing out any normal disease with an effective caster level of [paladin caster level +20] before it could take hold.

Magical diseases and infestations, which had an accelerated incubation speed would not be automatically flushed out, but would need to be rolled for every round. Taking 20 isn't an option, as the victim would have been brain-dead and turned to spawn within that period.

This compromise meant that the worms retained some threat, while still giving paladins an inherent advantage against them.

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