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Omer Joel
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.
ascendance
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.
MYST1C
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.
Omer Joel
QUOTE (ascendance)
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.

Ever watched the Dark Skies TV series back in the late 1990's? This sounds much like it, especially like it's russian parts, where the "Aura-Z" (the Soviet anti-"bug" agency) base got infested due to KGB attempts to use the "bugs" for mind control.

Given the severe power struggles most Stalinist states tend to have near their tops, this could be quite an interesting scenario - IMHO not EVERYONE in the top levels would be a Bug, but it wouldn't be easy to find out who's Infested and who's not, especially if there are inter-hive rivalries that make the Infested work against each other at occasions.

And I imagine that eventually your players will end up assisting the "Khruschev" (sp?) uninfested faction against the "Beria" (sp?) infested one and this will lead to something similar to the early 1960's "Destalinization" in the USSR - this time, done with FAB-III biggrin.gif
mintcar
QUOTE (ascendance)
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.

Thatīs awsome! Much better than just erasing and replaying Bug City. Heck, a lot has happened since the bugs last made themselves known, I think itīs time they pulled something like this off.

boskop-albatros
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 cool.gif
Rotbart van Dainig
Wasn't there a 'free' city in italy where the mob was infiltrated by bugs?
PlatonicPimp
GEMITO, the sprawl that came from genoa, milan and some third city I can't recall.
Mr.Platinum
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.
emo samurai
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?
Fix-it
QUOTE (emo samurai)
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?

Yes to the above. Especially the last one. Mantis Spirits are actually the most friendly towards humans (if you could call it friendly) because they prefer to eat other insects over humans.

No to all the rest.

They're still FAR too alien to even begin to control, or even deal with. Thier thought process is FAR to alien for humans to comprehend, much less live with.

When you can explain the actions of an ant colony, then you are ready.

Read Magic In the Shadow's shpiel on Insect totems, apparently it's just the Queen Spirits manipulating the shamans into summoning them. usually, the queen then kills the shaman and takes over the hive.
FrankTrollman
QUOTE
What if players could be insect shamans?


Then you'd have a character whose preferred method of conjuration is illegal in most of the civilized world (possessing a human on a permanent basis is considered murder almost everywhere excluding Manchuria, Evo, and Ares territories), and who can't conjure at all without it being a felony in many nations (both Tirs, for example).

That actually isn't all that big of a deal for some groups. A SINless Ork Catholic Theurgist is going to find profound legal problems using their magic in Aztlan or the Tirs, and many teams get by with those guys just fine.

Game mechanically, Potency ratings aren't balanced or allowed for player characters. Potency also doesn't have rules in SR4 yet, so you can get by without. Without potency, Insect Shamans are a little underpowered - they are basically just like Houngans except that they don't get to be "ridden" by their spirits, they only get to make zombies.

-Frank
BishopMcQ
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...
nick012000
QUOTE (FrankTrollman)
QUOTE
What if players could be insect shamans?


Then you'd have a character whose preferred method of conjuration is illegal in most of the civilized world (possessing a human on a permanent basis is considered murder almost everywhere excluding Manchuria, Evo, and Ares territories), and who can't conjure at all without it being a felony in many nations (both Tirs, for example).

That actually isn't all that big of a deal for some groups. A SINless Ork Catholic Theurgist is going to find profound legal problems using their magic in Aztlan or the Tirs, and many teams get by with those guys just fine.

Game mechanically, Potency ratings aren't balanced or allowed for player characters. Potency also doesn't have rules in SR4 yet, so you can get by without. Without potency, Insect Shamans are a little underpowered - they are basically just like Houngans except that they don't get to be "ridden" by their spirits, they only get to make zombies.

-Frank

Well, he could still summon Watcher spirits...
evil1i
QUOTE (PlatonicPimp)
GEMITO, the sprawl that came from genoa, milan and some third city I can't recall.

Probably Turin (Torino) - if they can imagine a megasprawl that encompases Genoa and Milan then Turin isn't that Much further.

http://www.colellachiara.com/devcon05/mapp...-aereoporti.png

Shows the extent around Milan I could imagine a sprawl (ala Seattle) in that area (Genoa is a stretched along the coast rather than stretching inland towards Milan if my memory serves me correct) .
ascendance
QUOTE (Omer Joel)
And I imagine that eventually your players will end up assisting the "Khruschev" (sp?) uninfested faction against the "Beria" (sp?) infested one and this will lead to something similar to the early 1960's "Destalinization" in the USSR - this time, done with FAB-III biggrin.gif

Right now, the main challenge of the characters (even if they don't realise this yet) is to convince their employers (the government of Japan, even if they don't realise this yet) that they shouldn't try and nuke the entire country into the stone age. After all, it's known that nuclear weapons at least knock the bugs into torpor.

What was funny is that the player characters ran around trying to tell all sorts of people, like the Draco Foundation, and so on. All these organisations basically said they couldn't do anything about it, mostly because the evidence was kinda flimsy.

It turns out, though, that one of the PCs bought himself a 6/6 contact, who I've decided early on was Megaera. He asked Megaera to help, and eventually, Megaera tipped off a powerful and influential "retired hacker." None other than Hitomi Shiawase, of course.

So, the game, which has had a decidedly "we hate the Japanocorps" mood, is going to take some interesting twists.
hyzmarca
QUOTE (Fix-it @ Jan 15 2006, 04:13 PM)
When you can explain the actions of an ant colony, then you are ready.

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.
RunnerPaul
And hyzmarca wins the thread.
FrankTrollman
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
Azralon
Imagine the awesome conversations generated if Cliff Clavin had Google2070 running constantly via AR.
hyzmarca
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.
FrankTrollman
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
Taki
The ennemy of my ennemy is ... just that.
Mantis spirits are cool since you don't meet them smile.gif
Moon-Hawk
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.
Azralon
QUOTE (FrankTrollman @ Jan 17 2006, 05:04 PM)
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.

So when I go get my tubes tied, I'll come out of the procedure as a zombie?

All infertile members of a species are undead! I hereby offer a bounty on all mules! Do not spay or neuter your pets, as these are crimes against the spirit world!!
Azralon
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.
Azralon
Aiee, double-post. Delete, please!
Phoenix (A-Team)
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.
FrankTrollman
QUOTE (Azralon)

So when I go get my tubes tied, I'll come out of the procedure as a zombie?

Not quite. You don't need to be reproducing right now in oder to be alive, you just need to have or have had the capability at some point. So even if I don't go over and impregnate you, even if you get a hysterectomy, you'll still be alive.

QUOTE
I hereby offer a bounty on all mules!


That's a very weird case. If you were to actually make a creature that cannot reproduce at all, it would be a biological robot - a zombie if you wanted to call it that It would be no more alive than your toaster or any other object that you assembled. A mule, however, is simply almost incapable of reproduction.

A mule has one set of genes from a horse, and one from a wild ass. When it makes sperm of its own, it randomly assorts chromosomes from its mixed set. The vast majority of the time, that means that it's going to be sending off a mixture of horse and ass genes, and that leaves its potential offspring with an incomplete set of horse or ass genes, and that's fatal.

But, there's still a chance for it to randomly grab the horse or ass chromosome over and over again - just as you have a chance to get only heads when flipping a coin many times in succession. In that case, the result would be the same as if a horse or ass were doing the breeding, and we know that works.

Similarly, a "seedless" watermelon isn't truly seedless. 1 out of 1024 seeds end up euploidal, just as if both of their parents had had 2 or 4 copies of all of their chromosomes.

-Frank
hyzmarca
QUOTE (Azralon @ Jan 17 2006, 04:13 PM)
QUOTE (FrankTrollman @ Jan 17 2006, 05:04 PM)
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.

So when I go get my tubes tied, I'll come out of the procedure as a zombie?

All infertile members of a species are undead! I hereby offer a bounty on all mules! Do not spay or neuter your pets, as these are crimes against the spirit world!!

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.
Kerberos
QUOTE (FrankTrollman)
QUOTE (Azralon @ Jan 17 2006, 04:13 PM)

So when I go get my tubes tied, I'll come out of the procedure as a zombie?

Not quite. You don't need to be reproducing right now in oder to be alive, you just need to have or have had the capability at some point. So even if I don't go over and impregnate you, even if you get a hysterectomy, you'll still be alive.

QUOTE
I hereby offer a bounty on all mules!


That's a very weird case. If you were to actually make a creature that cannot reproduce at all, it would be a biological robot - a zombie if you wanted to call it that It would be no more alive than your toaster or any other object that you assembled. A mule, however, is simply almost incapable of reproduction.

A mule has one set of genes from a horse, and one from a wild ass. When it makes sperm of its own, it randomly assorts chromosomes from its mixed set. The vast majority of the time, that means that it's going to be sending off a mixture of horse and ass genes, and that leaves its potential offspring with an incomplete set of horse or ass genes, and that's fatal.

But, there's still a chance for it to randomly grab the horse or ass chromosome over and over again - just as you have a chance to get only heads when flipping a coin many times in succession. In that case, the result would be the same as if a horse or ass were doing the breeding, and we know that works.

Similarly, a "seedless" watermelon isn't truly seedless. 1 out of 1024 seeds end up euploidal, just as if both of their parents had had 2 or 4 copies of all of their chromosomes.

-Frank

The central problem here is that the distinction between living and non-living things is a human constructs, and like all human constructs it doesn't fit nature 100%. Thus you get things like mules that doesn't really fit nicely into either the "alive" or the "dead" category. Even if mules where 100% sterille they'd still occupy this grey area rahter than fit nicely in the dead category.
Azralon
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.
FrankTrollman
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
Azralon
QUOTE (FrankTrollman @ Jan 17 2006, 06:32 PM)
Actually, the "it's not really a lifeform" card is what keeps spirits from being recognized as entities by the UCAS government.

I imagine you meant "sentients," not "entities," because quite obviously spirits are things of some sort. Either way, you're illustrating my point.

Spirits, per our RAW, have the Sapience power. As such, we as players can say with great authority that spirits are sentient because it's in black and white for us. It took a while for the in-game government of the UCAS to legally recognize Sasquatl as sentient, but that didn't mean they weren't beforehand.

So once again, science fiction is showing us how mankind's arbitrary classifications can firmly declare one thing despite the fact that the laws/creator(s) of the universe have might have deemed otherwise.

I repeat: Don't go labeling things as life forms unless you also accept that label as a subjective opinion.... and therefore definitely don't try to use that label to support a logical argument. All it gets you is an Azralon showing up all grumpy and verbose when he really should be going home from work. biggrin.gif
hyzmarca
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.
FrankTrollman
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
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