Imagine that the Bug Crisis of the mid-2050's hasn't happened.
Imagine that the Chicago Hive was built far more slowly than in Shadowrun Cannon.
Imagine that Bug City hasn't happened in 2055...

But it happened in 2070!

The Matrix is different. The corps are different. But the Bugs are the same Bugs, and the Windy City is the same Windy City. So five years after Crash 2.0, they errupt - and give us a chance to use the Bug City sourcebook with the streamlined SR4 rules.

I'm working on Bug Country 2070. I'm using a lot of ideas from Bug City, though. And other published materials on bugs.

In effect, the People's Republic of China (Henan) has been heavily infiltrated by insect spirits. Key party members, and the highest levels of the secret police have all been subverted. In effect, the gulags and the work camps have all been converted into hives. Not only that, subverted scientists are conducting experiments into cybernetically modifying flesh form spirits, and remotely controlling them through the use of pheremones.

The players tried to abduct an intelligence officer, who turned out to be a powerful flesh form. They killed him. Now, they're being recruited to discover the extent of the infiltration.

At the moment Bug City is waiting for a German release (the book wasn't translated when it was originally released back in the 90s because FanPro D was focusing on the AGS setting and nobody told them about the impact that book would have on the SR world) - still set in 2055 but with SR4 rules...
Translation is done, all that's still missing are SR4 bug spirit rules.

The Henan Idea is Awsome!-- you could be even sell that Idea to wizkids as BUG CITY II-BUG STATE!---next thing you know you'll get the FAB IV Mutation which will sart draining the essance out of every LIVING thing Magicly active or MUNDANE

Wasn't there a 'free' city in italy where the mob was infiltrated by bugs?

GEMITO, the sprawl that came from genoa, milan and some third city I can't recall.

Remeber those awsome Marvel comics called What If?

Well this so reminds me of those, and a new Game theme for me.


Thank you all.

What if players could be insect shamans?

And why are bug spirits so alien? My thought was that normal totems are merely symbols and wish for people to be like the things they symbolize. The dog totem wouldn't tell you to sniff peoples' butts; it would tell you to be loyal. The cat totem would get you to eat rat shamans; it would tell you to toy with your enemy before killing him. And so on, and so forth.

Bug spirits, however, try their very best to make their followers as much like them as possible. Roach shamans would develop a taste for sugar; beetle shamans would start trying to break things with their heads; female mantis shamans would try eating the men they have sex with. Am I right?

We can hope that Street Magic will lay out some of the rules for Bug Spirits, potency, et al.

I like the concept of a Bug Nation, more than I like rewinding Bug City...there are too many variables to cleanly evolve IMO. A similar process was done by one of my GMs, she ran Harlequin's Back to coincide with the arrival of Halley's Comet. She linked some of the bits about ambient mana levels and what not to the Comet, but some of the other loose ends were left dangling. Bug City, I feel would be that much harder to advance, but if you've got the time and will, then by all means...

It is a common misconception that the so-called queen ant is the absolute ruler of an ant colony. In reality, nothing could be further from the truth. The role of the Queen in simply one of a passive babymaker held captive by her own gigantic reproductive organs.

The orginizational nature of an ant colony could best be described as bottom-up, as opposed to the top-down orginization of human socities. The individual ants take orders from no one. Instead, they perform their duties of their own, limited, free will. In this way the ant colony is truely a paragon of communist democracy.

Ants communicate with each other using complex chemical signals. The most common forms of communication are for scouts to mark out paths to food and to potential threats. Other ants follow this chemical trail so that they might perform their duties, bringing back food and destroying interlopers. This chemical communication amongst workers and soldiers is why ants are so organized.

Individual ants lack complex decision making abilities and are driven by instinct. Every action they take is a response to outside stimuli that has been driven into them over millions of years of evolution and they act toward a single purpose, fulfillment of the all consuming desire to perpetuate their genes that drives all animals, even man. For the sterile ants this goal can only be accomplished using their queen as a proxy. Were all female ants fertile, the ant colony as we know it would not exist. The queen, who is more a pawn of the workers than the workers are pawns to her, would have no purpose and would certainly die. So long as individual females remain sterile, they are all forced to ensure her well being by any means necessary.

And hyzmarca wins the thread.

In truth, most ant colonies are neither bottom-up nor top-down. In fact, the vast majority of ant colonies are solitary because the actual organism is the colony not the ant. The queen is no more of a captive baby-maker than a human woman's uterus is. The ant queen is simply part of an organism with differentiated portions that perform different jobs.

Just as a scorpion has a stinger for protection, claws for feeding itself, and an ovapositor for reproduction, so too does an ant colony have soldiers to defend itself, workers to feed itself, and a queen to reproduce itself. Some ant colonies are more complex still, having multiple types of workers or soldiers, or even having entirely new castes (some ant colonies have special labor types performed by larvae, for instance).

But there's not really a social system there to be had. It isn't equivalent to feudalism or communism, because most species of ants operate alone. One colony feeds itself and eventually divides into distinct colonies. The exception, of course, is the Argentinine Ant, those colonies cooperate, and thus they have a simplistic but extremely effective social order - all related colonies of Argentinine Ant cooperate fully. They fight the same enemies, they share the same food.

And interestingly, though the Argentinine Ant is physically unimpressive, it's the most successful ant type the world has ever seen. The goal, as the goal of all creatures, is to maximize the temporal existence of as much of its DNA as possible. The ant strategy is to take cellular differentiation a step forward - and actually put physical space between the systems. Social strategies are an extremely recent development for ants, and were made in South America.

The Linepithema humile discovered tribalism, and two hive associations are currently having a war in Europe (two separate colonization events, one in Spain and one in Italy, have pushed back the 20 species of European ant and turned on each other and are having wars in France). And the Myrmelachista schumanni discovered agriculture, and maintain Amazonian "Devil's Gardens". They selectively destroy all vegetation except a species of tree that they nest and eat in, causing areas of mono-culture to develope in the middle of the rain forest.

-Frank

Imagine the awesome conversations generated if Cliff Clavin had Google2070 running constantly via AR.

If a woman's uterus had a brain of its own I'm sure that it would want to get out every once in a while.

Describing an ant colony as a single organism can be useful but it is no more biologically accurate than describing ahuman city as a single organism. Each ant is a distinct individual with an independant brain capable of something that could pass as independant thought.

Even so, it would be possible to describe an organism as a society with a distinct orgnizational structure. Within the human body King Brain rules abolsutely Prime Minister Pituitary Gland acts as a confidant and advisor to the King. Over time, the treacherous Vizir Gonads makes a play for power, corrupting the King with its own lustful desires.


The odd thing about the insect spirits is that they are highly anthropamorphic. Despite their much hyped "alien though processes" they act in much the way you would expect people to in similar situations. Most of their insectoid features are either superficial or nsterotypical. In reality, mantids rarely eat their mates, for example. Even their "alien thought prosesses" are based more in human misconceptions than in insect reality. Real insect thoughts are not alien. They are just simple.

Something is considered "alive" if it:

Eats
Grows
Irritates
Reproduces

Oh snap! It looks like ant workers are not alive. They don't reproduce, they can't any more than your liver cells can reproduce. The ants are clearly alive, however, just as your liver is. How can we reconcile that? By going up a level, the hive can reproduce, just as the human can. The ant worker is part of something larger that fulfills all the criteria of a living thing, and is thus alive.

---

But yes, Insect Spirits are anthropormorphized to a degree that I find frustrating. They really could have extremely unknowable goals and methodologies, but as written they just want growth and protection like any species, and seek to maximize their access to territory, kill threatening species, and make more of their own kind - a list of goals so astoundingly normal (even universal) that there's nothing to worry about. The only claim to "strangeness" that the Insects really have is that they don't speak well-formed English and don't consider themselves to be metahumans.

---

On a side note - why the hell would anyone ever consider the mantis spirits to be in any way friendly to humanity? Every mantis spirit in a nest represents the death of several humans. Contrasted with the fact that in a termite hive, every spirit represents the death of just 1 human. The mantis' fight the termites, which also means that the termites fight the mantis.

But if a nest has 20 termites in it, that means 20 humans were killed. If a Mantis nest has 20 spirits in it, that represents the death of about 35 humans. So at any particular level of success, the mantis are worse for humanity than any other insect spirit type. The argument that mantis are kind of good because they kill wasp spirits is actually less valid than the argument that wasp spirits are kind of good because they kill mantis spirits.

Arrrgh! The mantis writeup makes me so pissed. It holds these guys up as some sort of lesser evil when they clearly aren't. The only claim that could be made of the mantis being less of a threat to humanity is that perhaps they are substantially less competent than any other insect tribe - because they'll have killed more humans to reach lower levels of success than the other groups.

And it doesn't help much that they don't actually seem to act in any way similarly to that of actual mantis in the wild.

-Frank

The ennemy of my ennemy is ... just that.
Mantis spirits are cool since you don't meet them

Well, Frank, I think the reason the Mantis is considered the lesser evil is that, while one mantis does represent the death of more humans than one (insert any other insect type here), that one mantis will, in it's lifetime, kill dozens and dozens of other insect spirits, so the death of 35 humans to create the mantis causes the deaths of 100 termite spirits, thereby "avenging" 100 lives, and destroying several hives.
The key to this theory working is bad-assery on the part of the mantis spirits and their ability to reliably kill lots and lots of bug spirits in their lifetime.

Along more constructive lines, a good reason to keep insect shamans and spirits as NPCs is that some players simply like fighting against swarms of near-mindless enemies as well as having a "Big End Boss" to deal with later.

By borrowing heavily from the dynamic of the Aliens movies, bug spirits give Shadowrunners the chance to do just that.

Aiee, double-post. Delete, please!

Ah, the ol' debate over Mantis. All I got to say is that I look after mine. I got no problems makin' deals with them and organizing the slaying of a few bugs... but the minute they hurt one of my people, all deals are broken.

Exactly. The infertile, elderly women, and homosexuals are no more people than rocks are.

Edit: Actually, the criteria is best applied to a species as a whole, rather than individual members of that species. However, even then it produces potential problems when defining artificial life that may come into existance in the future. It may be possible to engineer a species of homonid that is completely infertile as a slave race, for example. It may be possible to build a self-replicating robot, as well. Such definitions aren't nearly as useful as they once were.


Actually, Frank's example of liver cells wasn't the best in the world. Liver cells do reproduce through mitosis. In fact, an entire liver can reproduce this way. If you cut a liver in half and separate them you'll get two whole functional livers after both regenerate. This is the reason why live doner liver transplants are fairly common.

Would it help you guys at all if I mentioned that both philosophers and scientists have thus far still failed to nail down a concrete definition of life? I mean, for crying out loud, how much science fiction has been produced around that exact fuzzy area?

My point is that playing the "it's not really a life form" card is never going to get you anywhere useful.

Actually, the "it's not really a lifeform" card is what keeps spirits from being recognized as entities by the UCAS government.

But of course, that's all tangential. An ant hive is a single organism from an ecological standpoint, and an ant queen does everything it "wants" to do. It is neither master nor slave, it is a unit with a function.

-Frank

Have it ever asked an ant queen if it is happy with its function? I havn't so I won't make assumptions. However, it is obvious that it has no real chocie in the matter.

As I said before, treating an ant colony as a single organism from an ecological point of view is useful. But, from the same point of view, you can treat a human community as a single organism. When determining the motivations of an ant colony, which was the original question, one must look at individuals as individuals. In the same way, when determining the motivations of a human community one must look at individuals as individuals.

Actually, I think it's pretty safe toassume that a queen is happy with its lot in life, because when they become free spirits they pretty much just keep doing what they were doing before.

-Frank