I think it's mainly the whole loyalty stuff, why would you want your loyal corp citizen-employees partake to have loyalty to another organization? See also in Threats 2, there's a small blurb in the Templar section of how some of them are in Aztlan protecting the Catholic faithful there. It's sort of similar, Aztechnology doesn't want anybody there to be loyal to an outside organization (in that case, the Church)... that and also the opposing viewpoints in the whole religious/social aspects too.

I would almost think that Frank has read my Aztlan chapter in SoLA.

Aztec religion is very specific that sacrifice, often blood sacrifice, is necessary to prevent the death of the sun and the coming apocalypse. Also, as has been mentioned, devotion is equally important. The Catholics and the Universal Brotherhood both threaten devotion to the Aztec gods.

So whether or not someone in Aztechnology knew about the Invae (and chances are at least one person did), they have many reasons to be against them.

Actually the fact that sacrificing them does nothing is extremely important. It is "proof" that the Insect Spirits destroy the animal spirits of people leaving them as nothing but husks of corn. That means that their deaths cannot feed the hungry gods and their existence hastens the end of the world.

If you happen to subscribe to Azteca, then it all follows quite lgically. If someone cannot be sacrificed that necessarily means that the Sun is not being fed and it Ends in Darkness.

Jus the corp section which references that chapter I'm afraid. But even having seen actual excerpts I still do not believe that book exists.

-Frank

The pain, the pain!

Ares is the only corp that actually understands how the bugs work. The Azzies kill everyone who is inhabited by an insect spirit, and they kill everyone who summons insect spirits, and... that's all they do. That's all they can do.

They can't go to the metaplanes and slay the queens in the citadel, preventing tem from ever investing their power into a new magician. They can't convince any hive to go do something else. They just fight and kill. And they don't win. They can't win because the Insect Spirits don't live here, they live elsewhere and they only send their members into this plane of existence when they are feeling strong over there.

Ares, on the other hand hasaan entirely different strategy which is more effective for their goals. By getting groups of insects to sign on they alone are able to send troops back to the Insect's metaplane. They can actually destroy hives permanently, and they do. And in exchange they cause real fear to the remaining hives, and they can offer them military aliance that the remaining hives understand and respect. And that way they get more hives to sign on with them, which gives them an even better force against the recalcitrant hives...

Aztlan is the most successful of the groups that simply plays whack-a-mole with the Invae as they appear. But that strategy is bullshit and ultimately pointless. Ares is the only organization with a halfway decent new plan. The fact that it appears to involve getting hives to ally themselves with it is an added bonus. If Ares has their way, there will be no remaining hives that are not on friendly terms with humanity.

-Frank

fixed

On friendly terms with Ares, you mean. Not humanity as a whole.

Personally, I like the strategy of Aztech more, 'cause it doesn't have the "dealing with the devil" feel.

...it hurts. I physically shed a tear when I read DE's reply.

Is that a spoiler or something you made up ?
I mean from where did you get this information ? I would really be pleased to know more about it

It's a scary day when Aztechnology is the more comfortable option.

And mfb's comment about Damien Knight isn't canon. I think it was more of a joke.

Meh. Today's enemies are tomorrows allies. It has already been discussed how the Invae are not really "evil", just alien.

If they can respect a treaty, I don't care if they are repulsive. I mean, what the heck is "Bubble and Squeak?" I don't know and I don't want to, but the Brtis are great enemies turned allies.

Often, but those treaties are more along the lines of "And I'll keep this in the fridge so it doesn't go bad before I eat it."

If the fruitpie can make it's way from the shop to my home via metaplanar access, and then burn my parents, friends and everybody else, then yes sir, I shall honour the treaty with the fruitpie.

It is. But in this case, I prefer the "shoot them all"-solution that Aztech uses.

Alliances don't last forever - Ares will have to deal with the bugs the same way Aztech actually does sooner or later.

Exactly. It takes a ridiculous plot development to make it thinkable.

~J

Exactly, the bugs are parasites, they cannot exist in the physical without killing something to use as a host. At the end of the day, the bug alliance is more than likely a stop-gap to them while they work their way around it, it can't work as a permanent solution because any foothold than can put in the physical is still a foothold, and a starting point to work on - be it the UB or an Ares alliance.

I'd put up with the odd human sacrifice over that any day... so long as I wasn't the one being sacrificed of course

Edit: Besides, sacrificing puppies works almost as well!

I eat meat. I cannot exist without killing something to put in my belly. I go through probably about 30 chickens a year all by myself. If the invae kill one chicken to bring across one of their friends, I don't even care. I don't care how much that chicken suffers, I don't care how disgusting and unsettling the process is. I just don't give a damn. What I do is objectively worse and I've already made peace with that.

-Frank

For flesh forms definitely. For True Forms, it doesn't matter.

At the very least, one has to consider a metahuman host to have a higher cost than does a chicken host. So while a hybrid form chicken is a failure, a true form off a metahuman is also a failure - you could have gotten the same result at a lower cost by throwing small dogs or chickens into the coccoons.

So assuming that the magein question takes the time to do this stuff right and modifies the inhabitation results appropriately - what then? So here are the results coupled with the costs:

• We start with a chicken and we end with a true form ant spirit. This seems ethically equivalent to feeding chicken to children so they grow big and strong.
• We start with a metahuman and we end with a Flesh Form. This is actually ethically complicated.
  
  Consider: the Fleshform has all of the memories of the original metahuman. It can act as the original methuman flawlessly. So the questin is: "Are they a different person?" And depending upon what philosophy you ascribe to about identity, the answer is quite plausibly yes or no. But if you accept a ontinuity of memory as sufficient to establish identity, you haven't actually killed anyone.

Now I'll go out on a limb and say that no matter what your philosophy happens to be, that infesting a metahuman and having them end up as a True Form is murder. But it's also an inefficient use of resources, so it seems like it would be easy enough to get the Hive to avoid doing that once they were operating in controlled circumstances.

But I can very easily make the argument that there is no ethical problems with optimized insect infestation results. If people agree to host Work Loas (and they do), then I see no reason why people wouldn't sign up to be Flesh Form Hive Workers.

-Frank

You're being vague in your terminology. That's only true for a Good Merge.

You're also implying a lot more control over the process than the rules support.

~J

Actually, the 3rd edition MitS was vague in its terminology. Street Magic is much more precise.

• True Form: the critter is destroyed utterly and a normal materializing spirit appears in its place.
• Hybrid Form: The critter is merged with the spirit. Bug parts show up on the critter and some memories survive while others do not.
• Flesh Form: The critter is essentially permanently possessed, but does not change its appearance at all. All memories remain, and the total package has Aura Masking.

The shift in terminology from "Flesh Form Hybrids" and "Good Merge Flesh Forms" to "Hybrid Forms" and "Flesh Forms" is a simplificatin and clarification of temrinology and I stand by it 100%.

-Frank

Having participated in the revision myself, I can tell you that it was not change for change's sake. The purpose was to make the nomenclature as clear as possible, while making the rules fit the storyline as closely as possible.

The storyline involves the Flesh Forms (or "good merged flesh forms" if you insist) happening more often, and most importantly at all. The rules presented in MitS don't really support that, characters like Theresa Montgomery are essentially impossible according to the actual TNs and thresholds ascribed to the process in that book.

The overhaul was not only made to disambiguate the nomenclature, but also to make the storyline unfold properly if you actually rolled dice for it - and it does so pretty well.

-Frank

Perhaps. Although that's not actually what the previous edition did. There were no "Good Merges", only "good merges". The insect merges who retained all of their metahuman memories, got no visible insect parts, and gained aura masking were not separately labeled. They were considered the same as the ones that turned into fully human-sized insect monsters with no memories of metahumanity at all, they just got different abilties on the chart on page 128 of MitS. Even that is a step towards unique nomenclature. Back in Bug City (p. 137) the chart didn't even use the word "good merge", it didn't use any nomenclature at all - the disguisable humans with insect powers were just lumped in with the rest of the flesh forms with no distinguishing marks at all.

And that's the point. The ones which are essentially humans that are secretly bug spirits are massively different in game mechanics, story effect, and feel from the ones that are essentially giant bugs with human parts. There needed to be a fundamentally different name, to the point that you behave as if there actually was one.

Now as to what the consistent name actually should be - I honestly don't think it matters. The progression of "True Form/ Hybrid Form/ Flesh Form" was seriously focus-grouped against the alternate nomenclature of "True Form/ Flesh Form/ Good Merge", and people prefferred the former by about 2:1. Seriously, more people found the nomenclature of "good merge" confusing than found it enlightening so it went away.

The ability to make the good merges ("Flesh Forms" under modern nomenclature) has been steadily increasing over time. In Bug City it required 6 hits on the opposed Willpower Test, in MitS it required 5, and in Street Magic it requires 2 (but with smaller dice pools and a fixed TN of 5).

Pre-revision fiction talks of good merges that appeared in groups to infiltrate society and undermine humanity, which was essentially impossible under any of the old rules (any spirit who popped out as a good merge was an Int 2 Charisma 2 retard who had no real spying capability). In Threats 1 it introduced the idea that the Insects were making careful use of of he good merges as fixers, johnsons, and intelligence officials. This indicates a level of control over merging that the rules just didn't represent. The 2XS -> Temple of the Sun bookseries talked of a consistent and successful effort to produce eloquent and efective good merges that again weren't in the rules.

And of course in Threats 2 it is revealed that Ares Scientists have figured out how to merge Insects with non-metahuman hosts to fill up hives without losing people or explaining disappearances. In the YotC material there are assassin cults of good merged insects.

---

So it isn't out of the blue that making aura masked flesh forms became something that was relatively predictable and achievable by Insect Magician characters in the Shadowrun world. It's not new nomenclature, as "flesh form" ws the term originally given to those whose insect merge left them as a human with aura masking and insect powers. And it's not new storyline, a this was steadily built-up to in Threats, Temple of the Sun, and so on. Between the advent of Bug City and the 2071 plotline there has been a steady and rapid development of merging technology by several bug traditions. Actually codifying them into the rules in Street Magic was something that took a lot of discussion and a lot of playtesting, and I'm quite happy with the results.

-Frank

Well I did say "If..."

But really? No I don't expect Invae to keep treaties at all. To be perfectly honest, I usually represent them in game as utterly malicious and nasty evil. I don't care that they think they aren't evil. I am not a fruit pie, and I know the distinction even if they don't (or don't care.)

At the risk of invoking Godwin's Law, Hitler liked puppies and little childeren. Whatever. I like to give the players something to really dark to go all out against as a break from all the grey that I throw at them in the normal runs.

I was just proposing a hypothetical, in a general Sci-Fi sense. You know the old saw about aliens not being just as strange as we can imagine but stranger than we can imagine. In that sense, if communication and a basis of mutual self interest can be found, the traties are possible, no matter how alien the aliens.