dailybestiary:

Most monsters are scary when you’re a kid, not so much once
you grow up.  (I no longer have flashes
of Audrey II every time I go into a dark basement, for instance.)

Termites, on the other hand, get even scarier.  You 15-year-olds have no idea.  For those of us with mortgages, a termite
swarm is legit the most terrifying thing in the Bestiary series.

Termites are also cool because they actually build something—huge mounds, 17 feet or
higher, according to National Geographic.  Which means the pony-sized giant termites
could build truly epic structures—easily a mile high if I’m doing my math
right.  Even taking into account
something like real-world physics, mounds the size of cathedrals (as Bestiary 5 suggests) would easily be
possible, provided there were a large enough food source nearby.  And speaking of buildings, giant termites can
also do what termites do best—take down earth and wooden buildings—ignoring
hardness of 5 or less.

To sum up, much of adventuring comes down to “Explore the
thing,” or “Defend the thing.”  Termites
give you things to explore and things to defend aplenty.  For simple vermin, that’s not bad.

The annual Woodcarving
Festival at Schönholt is a celebration of all things carving and
carpentry-related.  So it is naturally a
scene of absolute bedlam when several termite swarms are let loose in the main
exhibition hall.  The culprit, not
unexpectedly, turns out to be a gremlin.
But in the course of the battle and subsequent cleanup, adventurers discover
that many of the intricately decorated hope chests were being used to smuggle
contraband alchemical items—and worse.
Was this luck on the gremlin’s part, or was he following some obscure
moral code?

The Black Hills of
Heaven are a series of strange outcroppings that turn out to be the
cathedral-like mounds of giant termite colonies.  (Their black color comes from the dark sandy
soil of the area.)  But some of the
hills, when seen from above, suggest eldritch symbols…and at least one of the
colonies shows signs of aberrant corruptions.

One bright Tirsday,
the city of Hindon awakens to birdsong…from below
their houses.  The entire town as been
hoisted into the branches of a giant oak that stretches more than two miles
across.  Worse yet, the tree is infested
with giant termites that skitter through the cobbled streets, devouring
buildings and people alike.  Only when
the termites are slain can adventurers uncover what is really going on: A branch
of the multiversal World Oak, Ysfarn, has manifested in this world, hoisting
Hindon hundreds of yards into the air.

—Pathfinder Bestiary 5
242

Giant termites are known on Cannehr, where they are among the only vermin that the azkat do not try to tame. Records from the Kingdom of Kown-Dam report them in the jungles of Gladia’s mainland.