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[[File:legendology_dnd_article12_picMain_en.jpg|link=Dungeons and Dragons|frame|Worms, worms? I hate worms. They drive me crazy.]]
 
{{quote|'''Buffy:''' You and bug people, Xander. What's up with that?<br />
'''Xander:''' No, but this dude was completely different than praying mantis lady. He was a man ''of'' bugs, not a man who ''was'' a bug.|''[[Buffy the Vampire Slayer]]'', "What's My Line, Part Two"}}
 
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* In [[Neil Gaiman]]'s ''[[Coraline (novel)|Coraline]]'', Mr. Bobo is a trainer of mice. In the Other Mother's world, The Other Bobo is a being made of rats.
** In [[The Film of the Book]], the Other Bobinsky ends up turning into this as [[Glamour Failure]] sets in:
{{quote| '''Coraline:''' You're just a copy she made of the real Mr. B.<br />
'''The Other Bobinsky:''' Not even that, anymore... }}
* In ''The Green Brain'' by Frank Herbert, humanity has reduced nature to just a few zones in the Brazilian rainforest. Nature fights back by evolving a race of bugs that can, in large quantities, imitate human beings. The story opens with one such Worm That Walks managing to con its way past the border guards so that it can enter and attempt to infest a clean zone.
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* An assassination attempt in ''Mordant's Need'' by Stephen Donaldson features human skins full-to-bursting with cockroach-like insects that puppet the skins and then break out of their husks in order to devour their new victims.
* One common interpretation of the ending of [[H.P. Lovecraft]]'s "The Festival." (It says a great deal about Lovecraft's "issues" that this is explicitly a ''Christmas'' story.)
{{quote| Wisely did Ibn Schacabao say, that happy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For it is of old rumour that the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl. }}
** Though it could merely refer to a decomposing undead corpse infested - and possibly controlled by - maggots, or perhaps a single huge worm. We'll never know.
* One of the heroes of the grail in Eric Nylund's ''[[A Game of Universe]]'' is a colony of insects which walks around in humanoid form, relatively.
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* The [[Trope Namer]] is the D20 version of ''[[Call of Cthulhu]]''. It appears in the original Chaosium version, in the supplement ''Shadows of Yog-Sothoth'' (1982), but was called "the Crawling One."
** It was based on a creature that appeared in the [[H.P. Lovecraft|Lovecraft]] story "The Festival":
{{quote| ''"[H]appy is the tomb where no wizard hath lain, and happy the town at night whose wizards are all ashes. For…the soul of the devil-bought hastes not from his charnel clay, but fats and instructs the very worm that gnaws; till out of corruption horrid life springs, and the dull scavengers of earth wax crafty to vex it and swell monstrous to plague it. Great holes secretly are digged where earth’s pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl."''}}
*** Although it is unclear from the story whether such thing is an example of this trope or one human-sized maggot.
** An undead human corpse infested by maggots is also a possibility, since the verse is presumably supposed to refer to the long-dead ancestor of the protagonist who escorts him to the rite under Kingsport.
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* One of the kinds of monsters in ''[[Little Fears]]'' is worms. They gather into groups and mimic the forms of children. The problem is that they can't mimic eyes, so they have to actually kill children and steal their eyes to pull it off convincingly.
* The Slaught from the ''[[Warhammer 40000]]'' RPG ''[[Dark Heresy]]'' are an ENTIRE RACE of these. The trope is even mentioned by name.
{{quote| ''"The worm that walks has come for us all" Found carved into a bulkhead, Watchpost Hazeroth/Sentry 17. All hands lost, attacker unknown. 123.M40''}}
* The ''[[Mutants and Masterminds]]'' setting Freedom City features a villain called The Collective, which follows this trope. As every other character in that entire setting, he is a [[Captain Ersatz]] of an existing comic book character. Probably Marvel's Swarm (see comic section above)
* Wyld mutants with the "Hive" abomination in [[Exalted]]. One rank in "hive" and they have a beehive or snake nest somewhere on their bodies. Two ranks in "Hive" and the nest expands to include the rest of them.
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** In the Nanobots episode, the bots coalesce into a Monobot.
* In ''[[Invader Zim]]'' [[Wave of Babies|a bunch of baby-like aliens]] combine into a giant bipedal monster.
{{quote| "''FORM GIGANTO-BABY!''"}}
* In ''[[Re Boot]]'', we have Nulzilla. We also have {{spoiler|Enzo and Dot's father}}, who can regain a bipedal form and his ability to speak by making a <s> human</s> sprite-sized body of nulls, with the null that used to be him as the head.
* ''[[Codename: Kids Next Door]]'' had a villainous [[Crazy Cat Lady]] who surrounded herself with her thousands of cats and basically made a cat-shaped [[Humongous Mecha]] out of them.
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