Gorgadrith - The Purple Worm

Role in Its Society:

Gorgadrith is less a creature and more a moving catastrophe, a purple worm whose path through the deep rock has swallowed mines, temples, and entire Underdark fortresses. To dwarves, duergar, and drow alike, she is a whispered calamity—a name invoked alongside cave-ins and earthquakes.

No faction controls her. Instead, they read her like weather:

• Dwarven runepriests chart her tremors to predict where not to build.
• Duergar warlords use her last sightings to time assaults through “safe” tunnels.
• Drow priestesses interpret her eruptions as omens from the depths.

Sometimes, desperate or deranged leaders try to weaponize her, luring enemies into her wake or staging battles above her feeding grounds. These schemes almost always end in chaos: Gorgadrith does not distinguish between friend, foe, or bystander—only rock, and what’s inside it.

Her presence has carved a swathe of unstable territory known simply as the Gnawed Deeps, where maps are suggestions and yesterday’s tunnel may be today’s bottomless shaft.

Appearance Description:

Gorgadrith is titanic. Her body is a living tunnel of muscle and chitin, easily ten feet thick and hundreds of feet long. Her hide is banded in deep violet and bruised indigo, slick with stone dust and faintly iridescent where bioluminescent fungi smear across her plates.

Her head is a blunt, armored wedge dominated by a vast circular maw. That mouth is ringed with concentric bands of jagged, grinding teeth, each tooth chipped and stained with stone and old blood. Inside, rows of smaller, rasping spikes create a grinding spiral designed to chew stone, metal, and flesh into slurry.

Along her flanks, stiff barbs and spines rake the rock as she moves, leaving smooth, glassy scoring in her wake. Segmented plates flex as she tunnels, shedding flakes of stone and chitin. When she emerges into an open cavern, her sheer size warps perspective—she doesn’t slither so much as redefine what “wall” and “floor” mean while she is present.

The only “delicate” parts of Gorgadrith are the clusters of pale sensory nodules along her head and first few segments, quivering as they taste vibrations through stone.

Backstory:

Gorgadrith’s first meal in this world was a dwarven treasure vault, though she remembers none of the details, only the intoxicating mix of metal, gem, and carved stone. Something—perhaps a miscast spell, perhaps a natural weakening—opened a microscopic fault between her deep lair and the vault’s foundation. She followed the richest “flavor” of worked rock and ore, erupting through the vault floor in a storm of teeth and stone.

Survivors spoke of a purple “mountain” that ate the ceiling and half the clan’s ancestral relics before plunging back into the depths.

From that day, Gorgadrith learned a simple truth: worked stone tastes better. Mortared walls, carved corridors, reinforced shafts—their density and mixed materials are gourmet compared to raw bedrock. She began following the telltale tremors of civilization: the regular beat of picks, the thud of marching boots, the distant booms of blasting powder.

She has:

• Collapsed a duergar fortress whose walls were too laced with iron for her to resist.
• Devoured an entire subterranean temple’s inner sanctum, altar and all, leaving worshipers praying at a rim of smoothed, tooth-scored stone.
• Accidentally broken into a subterranean lake, drinking half the shoreline and vanishing in a geyser of mud and shattered stalagmites.

Now, the Gnawed Deeps mark her habitual range: a shifting network of fresh tunnels, plugged burrows, and ruin-riddled caverns where every tremor is suspect and every echo might be her turning back for another bite.