Well...yes, but...with paper maché.

Ant shaman, not wasp but the big decorations hid the cocoons for more of those being converted.

Apparently a lot of people stayed on after parent teacher day and the plan was at the prom to grab more kids to extend the hive beyond that one school to other schools.

Think of it. Your child comes home after a heck of a blow out and spreads the hive to kids at his school and then they can move on their parents too.

Okay, be honest, I can't be the only person who plans to have a character with a flamethrower named Scrutiny now, right?

I'd name mine "Maribelle". (IMG:style_emoticons/default/nyahnyah.gif)

Honestly...shouldn't a flamethrower always be named "Prudence?"

And all of a sudden I'm thinking of the Battle Sisters from Warhammer 40k...

Hmm. What's the closest thing to a meltagun in SR, I wonder?

I personally would name mine 'Charity', I mean ya gotta spread the flames to everyone. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wink.gif)

As for SR meltagun equivalents... doof, I would say flamethrowers or a laser would be the closest and even then, no, it's just not the same.

Nah, gotta go with "Purity" for the good old purifying power of fire.

Laser with a Flame-Thrower Wand mounted on the Underbelly?

I don't know a good name for a flame thrower, but it's given me a great idea for a character. A slightly pudgy but cute Brit dwarf or human woman who wields a flame thrower, specialises in incendiaries, and I think she'll call herself "Pudding Lane."

I can't think of a better name for a Shadowrunner than "Pudding." (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

Plus, some players will catch on to the reference and that's always a nice touch.

On the subject of Insect Spirits, the enclave is a nice atmospheric idea. The only risk would be how dangerous it would be and the need to be ready to counter any attempts on the PCs part to circumvent the game by calling in Lone Star. Invae are still hunted down, after all. New players probably wouldn't think of that, though. Still, you need to consider all angles. I'd accomplish it by making sure there was some illegal McGuffin that the PCs would be sure to lose if Lone Star or other authorities got involved.

I did a small collection of Wasp spirit NPCs. The PDF is around here somewhere. They were pre-Queen, though the nymph had been summoned, The shaman just needed to initiate and then the drek would hit the fan. They were based in a small S&M club in Seattle. The dominatrix-madam that ran the place was the proto-queen of course. Never got the chance to use it though, sadly.

EDIT: My PDF collection is here, very kindly hosted by Stahlseele. The insects are in one of the later NPC rosters. Also might have useful for any new GM. Hope it helps.

Well that's the problem with the gated community is that if they can send out an communication asking for help, even to lonestar, that's tough to block out. But inside a large building, the one thing you can add is that the walls might prevent communications, and if there is AR interface it may be that you're severely limited in access due to whatever communication nodes you are accessing inside the building. Ok, I may be making stuff up there, but you may want to decker/hacker a little something to play with. Though, you could make the stuff that you interface kinda like those odd stuff like say, in the bioshock game. Ok, I'm playing that game right now it's pretty fun.

Well they are shadowrunners, so there's probably some file or item that they're being paid to grab. If the place locked off and fumigated, and surrounded by police and media attention, it's goign to make it very difficult to complete the Shadowrun in time, if at all.

However, if you need to actually stop them from calling the star, have the community just outside of signal range. "Lonely Ranch" style. Or even better, the only neighbours are Amish, and the runners find themselves teaming up with Amish with pitchforks to eradicate the bugs.

Also, faraday cages/wi-fi inhibitors (for indoor communities) and dedicated jammers also work for outdoor communities, which I assume would be the most prudent for the game.

That sounds like a good idea (I've probably got the pdf lying around with the rest of my resources). The club is closed down for the night (because the shaman wants to initiate), and you get the call to go in armed for war, and don't know why. You smash open a door to find yourself in a creepy nightclub full of bugs. Actually, it reminds me a lot of the Ragnarock levels from Max Payne. Ritual magic included.

Laser with flame thrower duct taped to it.

Mounted on the underbelly. Puhleez. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/wobble.gif)

Well a thought on the religious weirdo angle, just replace universal brotherhood with a real life religion that gets infested by bug spirits. A good one to go with would be Scientology. I mean the players might already be weary of them, so if they come off weird it wouldn't set off too many alarms and i can see a church with much sci-fi connections easily becoming "infested".

I once ran a game with a full flesh form mantis who had the players help her set up her own little nest egg and corp. It all seemed pretty on the ball for the players being that she would have them extract a scientist from ares, attack ares, steal money from ares. Just seemed like a pissed off ex employee. In actuality she was a wage slave who was "volunteered" into one of their programs and got away. Now she hold a grudge and wants to use the knowledge she acquired to get back at the and set up a colony of sorts. The chick they pinched was a shaman she wanted to use to raise more mantises. The corp she was building was a plan to have a front for a kind of normal operation to not get much attention for her true motives. Plus she could get runners to bring in other bugs for her pleasure. Yum Yum.

Ares is also a great one to have in your bug campaign being that the fight them, experiment on them, and work with them. Good fun had by all.

I always had the impression that the Universal Brotherhood was the Scientologists, just name-changed for Shadowrun. Or it could have been the Moonies. At any rate, I had my first second-hand encounter with Scientology a few months ago. A close friend of a friend of mine joined them and is still with them. My level of concern about this organisation has actually gone up and I think we should all be a little more active in laying anti-scientology groundwork. The methodology of this organisation is obvious. Convert the leaders in time-honoured fashion (these days, that's film stars rather than kings and chiefs), subvert the legal system. They really are our very own real life Insect hive.

Back on subject, all good points about dealing with the Lone Star issue. I was just warning to be careful the mission isn't of the form "Kill Mr. X" or something else that can be easily accomplished indirectly.

A couple more ideas...

Smugglers Tales
While on a smuggling run through the NAN... the team is forced to seek shelter in a small town, a semi-regular smuggler stop-off, due to a nasty storm (or border patrols or whatever). As the runners enjoy the town's hospitality, they end up trading stores with an oddly large number of retired smugglers. They've all decided to settle down in this town, though they're not sure why. Secretly, the town has been taken over by insect spirits.

Miracle Cure
The headlines and scream feeds are blazing with news of an A-rated corp that has developed a cure for <insert horrible/crippling disease of choice>. Subjects of the new treatment report that they're in excellent health. Before and after image are used. It seems like a miracle. The catch? The patients become host to an insect spirit. Preferably something that seems really innocent, like a butterfly spirit or something.

-paws

What about using insect spirits as good guys for a change (or at least not worst guys)?

That's kind of like using Toxics or Twisted as good guys. Its kind of a stretch. But if you have an idea, please share. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/smile.gif)


-paws
PS I was a bit surprised to see they included Spider as a PC-playable totem mentor spirit in 4th edition. To my recollection (which is very spotty c. 3rd edition) they were never good guys.

They're insects who want to invade our manasphere, inhabit the bodies (inhabit, NOT possess) of our population and effectively subjugate human kind, for little reason other than it's a bit crowded back home. Spin that into an underdog story.

Well, Ok, I'll try.

Beholden

A Shaman (for this example, is name is Jonas) receives a call from the insect spirits to let them into his world, in exchange for greater magical power (maybe he's a MIT&T student struggling to get through the coursework, due to not being so bright, and maybe he's involved in drugs and has a syndicate bleeding him for money). So he sets up a few small hives in exchange for it.

It works well, and he starts passing his grades with the magical knowledge his Invae mentor grants him. They even sort out those mafioso leg-breakers who were after his kneecaps. And he's even managing to pay rent, because he can live in the apartments of the leg-breakers, and he's got disposable cash anyway. Jonas justifies his actions by only selecting "bad people" like drug dealers, corrupt cops, SINless, humanis thugs and gang members.

But after the hives get bigger, and the insects start picking their own targets, innocent people, maybe even Jonas's few friends, he starts to feel reluctant and the Queen forces him to stop going to University lectures, because the needs of the hive come first. What has he gotten himself into? He was a sucker for the syndicates and their drugs, and now he's a sucker for an alien spirit that doesn't care about him, it's just using him, to kill innocent people. He wants it to stop, he wants to get out.

Jonas' Queen isn't too bright when it comes to the matrix, so he manages to get a message out to a fixer. He's got the money to pay the bill, so the Fixer hires the runners to kill the queen and destroy the hive. Jonas loses his magic in the process, but he feels he's finally done the right thing. He gives the runners the money he has left, any gear that the Invae weren't using and maybe even his magical foci. And so he leaves to start his life without drugs and without magic. Maybe he becomes a social worker, or works in a hospital, or educates the populace about the Invae on some Oprah style show. Maybe he even becomes a contact for the runners later.

Re-development of the Species

A radical anarchist gets in touch with the runners. She hates the establishment, and looks the part, with the vitriolic rage in her eyes and the tattoos all over her skin. There's a big old industrial structure on the edge of town (a refinery, a quarry, a water processing plant, coal power station, whatever - but it's abandoned) and squatters have been living there for years, and her and her anarchist friends hold cell meetings there occasionally. But the area is gentrifying, and she's found out that the corporate bought city planning committee plans to bulldoze the place and put the squatters out of a home, to create apartments or worse, a mall. She thinks it's wrong that they're fragging with those people's community space, as it's all they have in this f*cked up capitalist society. Frag the man, man.

So the runner team's goal is to overturn the sale of the property by whatever means possible, matrix fraud, coersion, whatever.

However, there's a few details the runner's might dig up. The development corp is an Ares shell, and it doesn't feel right. If the hacker digs deep enough, he'll find that the "construction" workers are all using fake SINs. If the legwork goes further, the runner's find that they're not just Ares employees, but Firewatch/Knight Errant. A combat team.

Of course, the squatters are not just illegal aliens, they are insectoid spirit aliens. It's a hive. There's a few ways to discern this. One is by having a close enough look (probably astral) at the squat. Another is to investigate a lead on rumours of missing persons in the area (that have been mysteriously kept quiet), and if the runners do enough legwork, some of the missing persons were card-carrying Anarchists, just the same as the girly that hired you. If the face got a huge amount of hits on the negotiation test when talking to A-girl, then she might even confide that she knows they're Invae, but she still doesn't think it's right for the corps to take their home away (she's an idealogue, and she doesn't really know that much about insect spirits - thinking perhaps that the stigma is corporate media spin).

You can roll the KE/Firewatch team two ways. The most obvious is that they know it's a hive, but are reluctant to just send a strike team into the building, because it will generate bad press for a gentrifying neighborhood. Invae are a PR guy's bad dream. So they're trying to do it diplomatically, by getting the development permits and making it look all nice before dropping a shroud on the place and filling it with a concoction of FAB-III, Seven Seven and insecticide, then clearing out the bodies under cover of darkness (or just using them as bug-resistant fertiliser for the new gardens around the shopping mall). On the other hand, it might not even be a bug op, Ares has just sent a covert strike team just in case they need to purge some squatters, or if the anarchists give them any trouble. This one probably makes the climax funnier, because it's good to see a hit team with egg on their faces, isn't it?

There's a few ways this could end. If the runners succesfully take the development rights away from the Ares shell (who are the handlers for Project Re-Development), they'll just send the hit team anyway (fake SINned and without identification, of course). The runners will be calling A-girl to organize to get their money and she'll be "The pigs are coming in now and they're coming hard! If you want your money you're going to have to help me fragging deal with this!" and hangs up. Gear for war if you want your cash.

If your runners are too smart to get involved with an ares hit team (provided they did the legwork right), then you might want to have them meet A-girl at the squat for your money and free entry to a sweet Anarchist party.

Either way, the team goes in, and probably discovers it's an insect party, and you're likely to end up the main course. It varies on situation, but if the runners are about to get overwhelmed in combat with insect spirits, then have the Firewatch team break in and start slaying bugs. If you dressed for war, you might be in the middle of defending the structure from the hit-team (it could work, you have lots of cover to work with, and the hit-team are expecting bugs, not runners.) when the bugs attack. Or you kill the Ares hit-team without much problem, and then when it's time for you to collect your fee, one of the anarchists/bugs might think that you know too much, or would make a good merge, and then you've got to deal with that problem too.

The far more hilarious outcome, I think, would have a hit team that's relaxed, and is just going to be murdering a few defenseless squatters and some anarchist try-hards. And then they get a nasty surprise. And the runners could even choose to assist them. And that way you can still take the money off A-Girl's corpse, or get re-imbursed for your assistance by the Ares handler who mishandled the operation so badly, and can spin it so that he hired the shadowteam himself, on his own intuition.



Of course, those plots don't really paint the insect spirits as good guys, but it gives a new spin on the relationship between insect spirit and shaman, and the second puts the runners in a hard place, when they find out that Ares aren't really the bad guys, they're just working for a misguided girl who's probably going to end up a insect slave.

Insects spirits aren't evil. They don't want to kill humans (well, maybe some of them do, after having humans kill so many of them), they just want their hive to survive (and maybe to expand).

You know how some insects are really useful to humans? For example, bees help with pollenization, ladybugs help to get rid of aphids and so on and humans can be useful to them in return.

So here is the idea (very basic, need more explanations): there's a small town somewhere, close to a big corporate factory. The factory has been polluting the land and air for a long time, with a very bad effect on the health of the population. All legal actions taken by the town got nowhere. Lately, a shaman there has been contacted by an insect spirit: in exchange for his help in summoning the queen and acceptance of the hive by the population, the hive could help the population to clean the land. The villagers accepted, and some terminally ill inhabitants of the town became hosts for spirits. Now the village existence is better, but the actions of the insect spirits against pollution have (for some reason to expand) a negative impact on the factory. The corporation wants to get rid of the bugs, but the corporation doesn't want it to be known that there were insect spirits there and doesn't want to be held responsible for killing the local population.
That's the reason why they've sent the runners there...

Okay, that could work.


Mitsuhama rapes the land... puts up big, pollution spewing factories... A town is dying, literally, because of the carcinogenic pollution... Locals are getting nowhere thanks to government corruption... Along comes a charismatic shaman, and boy does he have a deal for the town... cure some of your sick and dying residents and they get to stick it to the corpgov... Things escalate.... The runners are hired to do counter-terrorism and protect the factory.

Sounds like a run in Tsimshian to me.

Thinking about it, it has something I really like in my runs: the runners end up with two bad solutions: help the corporation kill the population or help a insect spirit hive that's peaceful and even helpful right now, but that could become a threat one day?

Wow! That's a good one. Humans and, lets say Ants, living and working together voluntarily. And they being Old Age Pensioner Hybrids adds a whole new level of horror to something that I thought had already been maxed out. Can you just see the composite-eyed, mandible jawed, blue-rinse hair-do wearing creature crawling along the nursing home ceiling toward the PCs? Congratulations, Blade. We've found a scarier setting for a run than the clichéd over-run underground base.

For my take on it though, how about the PCs aren't hired by a corp to run against the village, but by the village to defend themselves against a greater threat. What could be a greater threat than an Ant Hive? Mantids! (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif) I've never liked that people keep trying to see them as "good" insect spirits (which I think is at least partly due to them stereotypically being predatory, sexy girls).

That would be one very crazy game. (IMG:style_emoticons/default/biggrin.gif)

-K.

Damn, that there's some good stuff. I'll have to steal the first for the Boston stuff I'm writing (is that cool?) and the second as a con game or something. That is *sweet*.

knasser: enturbulation.org (I think that's the address) for all of your wacky Scientology needs. There are people out there laying out the groundwork - you just have to get past the fact that they're from 4chan.

That'd make a great follow up run, assuming the runners didn't get in bad with the hive.
"Where? Huh-uh. No. No way. Not ever again."
"Look how much they're offering."
"Oh. Uh, wow."

-paws
PS always wanted to play a Shaman's Way Adept with a Mantid totem...