Was it the Swamp Thing, where Swamp Thing's girlfriend's uncle inhabits her husband's dead body as an insect spirit? I could totally understand that. That was great horror comic while Moore wrote it.

The idea is obviously completely original, like every single aspect of Shadowrun.

When in doubt, use the Lovecraft excuse. An author had a nightmare.

I always thought Alien, without ehrm the aliens .

Them!

They probably just came up, well, naturally. There are a lot of animal totems for shaman, but they are all mammals or birds, with a few reptiles. Someone probably though, "what about bugs as totems?" Then followed a discussion about bugs being icky and completely alien to normal human means of thinking. Hey, sounds like a good idea for a foil. A little research or background knowledge revealed that insects have queens, highly regimented societies and come from eggs that go through several stages. For that matter, certain species lay their eggs on or in host species so the young can feed on them after hatching. Did we say foil? Now we have a horrifying threat.

Thus we have insect spirits that are completely alien to the standard higher animal totems and spirits that come into being by feed on the souls of helpless metahumans. Makes for a frightening enemy.

My guess is that they come from the same essential source that bug stuff always comes from-insects are creeeeeeeeeeeeppppppppppppppyyyyyyyyyyyyy! Nothing much more complex than that.

AFE

Alien; they got the same feel. + the "insects are creepy" angle

-I do GM my insect spirit stories using "Alien" movies mood-

Conversely, I also believe the "Aliens" creative people obviously got inspiration from insects with all their creepy social structure.

It does not matter, every idea comes from somewhere and eventually becomes a totally different thing.

Cheers,

Max

I'm not saying that they're unoriginal; I'm just wondering if the people who made the invae have good taste in comics.

I think you'll have to ask the old school author's on this one, but I imagine it was Tom Dowd's work. And as always when this subject comes up, I have to put in my vote for the Bugs arc to be..."The Best Metaplot Ever!" (reverb, reverb, reverb). Seriously, starting with hints in the shadowtalk, building up the adventures, excellent climax in Bug City...it was the biggest event they could get away with without shattering the world. Props.

I second Kyrn's post entirely.

I'll also agree to the best metaplot ever. It could easily have been their worst if they'd done it to seattle but they did it to a city that hadn't been covered much in the fluff, they didn't do it to the whole world so if you had set your game in chicago you can just have the team go to boston or something. And it is just wicked good fun and allowed me to run a few post apocalyptic style runs in SR. Good times.

Well thats really the fun about SR. There's an environment for just about everyone. Space is still a very limited frontier perhaps. But just about everything else is there.

Unless I'm mistaken, even though 'officially' the CZ doesnt exist anymore. It's still very much there and pretty much in the same shape it was before.

Yeup, they dropped the CZ and are 'resonably sure' that the bugs were eliminated but it's still the biggest Z zone on the planet and is still largely torn up and ignored by 'proper' society. And there are of course all kinds of shadowtalk indicating that some bugs survived and adapted and all other kinds of nastiness. It's still a great post apocalyptic urban hell hole, though anymore you'd have to reach a little bit to find a compelling reason for runners to go there. Unless of course they lack a proper fear of bugs, then send them in and watch the phobias build up.

As a PS bugs did lead to my all time favorite PC, a street sam, utterly proffessional, cold calm, the whole nine yards. And goes completely batshit anytime he sees an ant. He was good times. Or ya know, not so much if he was holding a gun and you had an ant crawling on you.

That's where you get a warhead, but instead of a Nuke, fill it with Raid cans.

While I can't prove it was a direct source, there was a 1971 pseudo-documentary called The Hellstrom Chronicle that has always encapsulated the idea of the Insect Spirits. It's fairly obscure, I'd never heard of it and only ran across it on imdb scrolling through random quotes. The link is to the quote page for the movie; scroll through it and see if there is anything on there that doesn't apply to Insect Spirits.

It also served as the inspiration for Frank Herbert's Hellstrom's Hive.