I find that bug hunts can quickly lose their flavor. In the old days there were huge absurdly scary things like the Church of Scientology Universal Brotherhood and the Chicago containment zone. The latter, if use well, could give the players a sense of the true of horror that could only be experienced by someone who lives in the movie Aliens (a feat that could only otherwise be accomplished by the misuse of the Magical Ticket from Last Action Hero) while the former exposes the players to the true horror of being a Scientologist.

But once you've killed one bug you've killed them all, in a way. Familiarity breeds contempt. As the bugs have been expanded on and expounded upon they've lost some of their je nous se qua. They're no longer just scary alien things. They have motives. They can be reasoned with. They're really just like any other person (if that other person happens to be a inhabitation spirit).

But real life spirits can give us some inspiration about what true alien horror is. So I offer the following link.
http://www.cracked.com/article_15816_5-mos...s-in-world.html

There is really nothing that I can add to that because, damn, it says it all. I especially like the picture of a Japanese hornet, outnumbered one-thousand-to-one, ending up knee-deep in one thousand dismembered corpses after three hours of non-stop killing.

Well the good thing about the japanese hornet, they are big enough to see and shoot with shotguns. Also I don't think anyone would really blame you for using a shotgun on them either.

Well, thank you. Now I'm going to have nightmares forever.

The image of the giant bug in Target: UCAS hunting down and, with several others, tearing into a bee insect spirit colony is just wack. That'd be the kind of melee that kills cities.

It's je ne sais quoi.

Makes you wonder why they use giant magical bugs instead of real ones... They're about as scary.

I would actually argue that having the bugs change and get motivations and allies was the only way to keep them from getting boring. For implacable alien hordes you've got the horrors and the shedim, and neither one is really that interesting. For brutal combat with insectile monsters you really can do just as well with a Wyrd Mantis as with a Hybrid Beetle.

Making them into something which was a genuine faction which could potentially hire the runners and compete with other groups who were situationally in the wrong makes them different adventure to adventure. And that's the only way to have them show up in more than one adventure without getting old.

-Frank

Take one dose of starship troopers, add in some of the final fantasy movie (not advent children), round up with some alien quadrilogy, and you got bug spirits

After working a summer in a bug lab (studying parasitoids as insecticides), I got quite my share of good bug-related stories (as a note, since predominately we were studying lepidoptera, it was in fact a bug lab, although not a true bug lab, ho ho!)

Insects do some strange things. I noticed that when a wasp laid its eggs in the caterpillar, the caterpillar continued about its life normally until one day it went up to the top of its petri dish and just hung out there. Then you could see these little white lines through its skin, which would press out one after another. You'd generally get about one or two dozen of these tiny, yellow works that would literally eat their way through the caterpillar and make a nest on the outside. Since the caterpillar was perforated, it lost hydrostatic pressure and died, but the little larvae made fuzzy stuff, sort of like a furry cocoon, and pupated inside that, all two dozen snuggled together. It was sort of cute. Seeing the wasp that lands on a cockroach, inserts its ovipositor inside of it and uses that to 'drive' the roach to its nest, and the one around here that paralyzes the cicada, brings it to the wasp den and leaves the cicada alive, aware, but unable to move while the larvae eat their way through it makes me think that overall the period between hatching and pupating (i.e. - while the larvae are within the host and still eating) may result in some interesting behaviors on the part of the host.

I don't know about all, but some (most?) of the dirt dobbers around here put spiders in their "nests".

A head on bug nest gets pretty common place after the first few. the real fun with bugs after that is surprise- Finding out the people who hired you are bugs, the fact bugs can take over someone, effectively changing the rules.

A few years ago We did a run on a corp facility in Kansas that was supposed to be a high tech research plant. We were told were file to grab. We didn't know what was on it, didn't need to know. A file's a file. We did our research on the place, guards, sec etc. went in. The place was developing 'tame' bugs for a corp but no one told the bugs and they'd turned it into their hive. it was a surprise to walk into and the get away, in Kansas, nice open plains left us feel very vulnerable even after fighting clear.

another example was the ant shaman from Queen Euphoria escaped and a year (RL) later had reformed his nest at the school used in Ivy and Chrome. It was a setting we thought we knew well and had used some of the people there as contacts before and then it was gone and changed. Controlled by someone who wanted revenge on us and we walked into it.
"It's Vi,There's a problem. Can you meet me behind tyhe gym tonight after 'lights out'?"
We were not expecting trouble, I mean what a 17 year old at a private school calls 'trouble' and a group of experience runners calls 'trouble' are going to be different. and so had just normal side arms and street armor to take on an ant nest.
going back to clear them out, now properly outfitted for it we realize not all the kids have been taken over so if that 14 year old girl in front of you a scared child in need of rescuing or the hidden bug spirit who's about to rip your freaking head off?
Oh and add on the mind games played by mantids, the guys in our group could be SOOOO stupid, and these things are still the source of nightmares.

Oh my god... and I thought the bugs in Okinawa were inappropriately large.

Forget bug spirits, I'm sicking an awakened hive of those things on my players.

My favorite bug story involves a parasite that infects slugs and does two things, well three really.

1. Takes over the slugs nervous system
2. Forces it to climb the highest blade of grass/structure
3. Climbs INTO the slugs er... eye stalks? And causes the the eye stalks to pulse up in down in a rythmic fashion (the stalks become brightly discolored and it rather looks like the slug is trying to attend a rave or some sort.)

The reason the parasite does this is so the slug will attract the attention of a passing bird, allowing the parasite to be eaten by said bird and allowing it to continue it's life cycle.

I've always wanted to spring some variation of that on my players... Hm....

Cool! a mindcontrolling suicidal Ravasite

I swear, sometimes I feel like all it would take to lose the planet to those weird little bastards -- and by this I mean in real life, "normal" insects -- would be for them get just a little bit bigger on average. They've got numbers, strength-for-mass, resiliency-for-mass, speed-for-mass, they can bite and sting and spit venom, they've got more limbs than us man-for-man, they've got everything else going for them. The only thing keeping us alive against them is that we're just fucking bigger than them.

Nevermind Starship Troopers. They don't need to be twenty feet across or anything to totally own us. Imagine if your average ant was, I don't know, just six inches in length. They'd run this joint in no time.

Very neat!

Huh... What eats shadowrunners?

Double-crossing johnsons

Hehehe... Insects did rule the planet once upon a time, said time being known as the Carboniferous. See, the problem that keeps most bugs from getting big is air, quite simply. Bugs doesn't have lungs, in the classic sense; what they have are holes in their exoskeletons that deliver air directly to the muscles (a bit of a simplification, but not an excessive one); in short they have a passive oxygen delivery system as opposed to the active one we have. So, at current oxygen levels in the atmosphere, they literally cannot get any bigger without suffocating.

Now, flash back to the Carboniferous. We had large, wet marshes and jungles, that kept on burying massive amounts of carbon (which we now dig up as coal and oil), and the oxygen that that carbon used to be associated with just ended up in the atmosphere. How much oxygen? 35%, as compared to today's 21%. Bugs got big. How big? 3 meter long centipedes. Carnivorous dragonflies with wingspans of 70 cm.

Fun part is though, once the oxygen levels dropped, all of the big bugs went extinct. And then the vertebrates got to rule the planet, first the amphibians, then the reptiles and now the mammals.

Of course, once you toss the Awakening into the mix, all of that goes out the window; An Awakened bee hive? That's a scary thought or, worse, an Awakened giant spider...

...And I, for one, welcome our new insect overlords...
--Kent Brockman: Springfield Channel Six

[I know, not terribly original but it does fit]

Yeah! We're safe, thanks to Science!

As for the parasites changing the behavior of whoever eat them, that's exactly what symbionts in SR4 are based on.

I got a can of raid here and I'm not afraid to use it!

After a certain point, I don't think they would be hesitant to use it either... on you.

Stuff's nasty.

Watched the wasp vid . try listening to Blue oyster cult "Don't fear the Reaper" while your watching it. Vicious fraggers.
I hate bugs ! Every time we have run into them in game, I have flashbacks of an incident in RL. I was working in a dunkin donut shop and the guy came to spray for roaches. He opened up the grease trap ( a 12 inch tunnel in the floor) and started spraying . The roaches just boiled out in a wave. I was on the counter screaming like a little girl. there must have been millions of the damn things down there.
So in Game I tend to panic at the first sight of bug spirits. I always get a picture of the donut shop incident in my head with 3 or 4 foot long roaches.
Example: my character,Evan" Hugh" Jorgan,( Tantric mage) sees bugs boil out of a hole "FRAG,FRAG,FRAG!!. Eat this you bastards!!!!!!!!!"he screams like a little girl..(over cast manaball at force12, taking out quite a few bugs and several party members before the drain starts popping blood vessels in his eyes and lungs. he then continues to cast until he explodes)
I tend to be one of the voices of reason in our games , just not with bugs

double post , my bad

or maybe it was a bug

They're just bugs, or wet stains on your news paper (or some cases, core rulebook)
generally i only kill insects when they're bugging me (Pun intended), seriously, what can be more fun than torturing spiders through suffocation and burning them alive .true story, had this nasty big spider crawling around the floor once.. well, that's another story

I don't understand why people kill spiders. Then again, I was raised to believe that killing them is bad luck. And their utility outweighs their ickiness. Dealing with dangerous ones does become a pain though. Pun intended.

As for roaches I don't think I'll ever look at a Dunkin Donuts the same way again. Though it's not like I needed any more reasons to not go there.

RL: I was a kid reading a comic book at my grandma's house, it was summer... then I heard a buzz. A whole colony of wasps was moving house and they decided to fly past me, including something like a big bloated inch long wasp. Beautiful, and very, very scary. I felt really tiny and fragile and to me the flight of the wasps took forever. I have deep respect for bugs.

RPG:

Yep, bugs are scary.

Cheers,

Max

One thing to keep in mind about the Hornets vs. honey bees was that those were European honeybees, and those poor li'l guys haven't ever had the time or need to evolve a defense against those monstrosities. Japanese honey bees on the other hand, are devilish bastards, and will actually mob the first hornet scout en masse, covering them with their bulk and contracting all the muscles in their lil' bodies, raising the temperature of the mob and the hornet to over 110 degrees Fahrenheit, which the hornet cannot survive. Basically, they mosh the fucker to death. If the Hornet has time to drop enough pheromones to get reinforcements, that's one thing, but the general rule still holds: don't piss off honey bees.

Wow... what eats Shadowrunners.

Maybe a Great Dragon is tired of actually having to go get runners who have failed him. Maybe he just infects you with an awakened version of this parasite and gives it a couple of days.

Than he takes a little flight over the larger buildings in the area... you know, on the way to lunch.

Bugs want to bite me. Spiders kill bugs. Ergo, spiders are my friends. I never kill spiders if I can help it (of course, that stance is helped by the fact we don't have poisonous spiders here).

Spiders want to bite you too, though. The enemy of my enemy is not my friend (if they happen to be my enemy, too). Let's say I hate Fortune (who's a good sport about this sort of thing). If I hate Fortune, and cancer kills Fortune -- I don't automatically love cancer, and want to have it, myself. Cancer can be bad for me every bit as much as it's bad for Fortune. In much the same way, spiders are as bad for me as they are for bugs.

Spiders kill bugs, sure. But *I* can kill bugs, too. So why should I not kill spiders (who are as irritating to me as bugs)?

I never had any spider try to bite me. Or try to eat my food. Or my clothes. In fact, no spider ever hurt me (as I said - we lack poisonous spiders here). Bugs on the other hand do all that stuff.

To be honest, I even feel bad destroying spider webs spun in my flat - all that hard work wasted.

Everyone is tasty to different bugs. I used to sleep on a high shelf right next to a family of poisonous spiders. They would make webs and crawl around on my face and it was all good. In the morning I would look at the mosquitos they had captured and smile. Then I'd shake myself slightly so that they would have a chance to crawl off me and I would get up and start my day. That's never been a problem.

On the other hand, I've been clamped on by crayfish six times (I don't hunt crayfish, they just do that). And I have independent confirmation of the supposedly "not aggressive" Potato Bug climbing out a hole, running across the street, and then latching itself onto my body in an attempt to kill me. Those things have bitten onto me more times than I can count.

Everyone gets along with different arthropods. I happen to enjoy the company of spiders and bumble bees. But crawdads and potato bugs have to die.

-Frank

I have! Almost died! Not fun! Do not try at home!

What spider was that?

Trapdoor. Nasty fuckers.

Some wasps hunt and kill trap door spiders.

So? They suck too!

I think Fuchs is an insect spirit sympathizer. quick- get the willie pete grenades...

Evidently Frank took "Crawdad/Potato Bug Beacon" IRL character generation.

I hope you got some neat positive quality to even it out.

Fuch's does sound like a prime candidate for bug infestation. I knew there's a reason i keep a can of photo mount and a lighter near my desk...

Of my many and varied neuroses I am arachnophobic, arthrophobic and teratophobic. That said I try not to kill bugs, spiders or other vermin. I feel everything has a right to live and as long as they don't harm me or let me see them in my home I say live and let live. I know my house has spiders under it. But I don't care as long as they stay there. Still though, bugs *shudders*.

Damn, do you never clean your room? Spiders dont spin webs overnight

I'm suddenly envisioning Frank's room looking like that state(?) park in Texas just enveloped in webs.

Damnit. Now i have a steel cage match idea...

A colony of africanized honey bees vs... Japanese giant doom hornets.

know who loses? Little timmy who gets too close to the action.

Though my money's on the africanized honey bees riding the giant hornets into battle against us

Actually, depending on the spider, they very much do. We had a spider outside our living room window this fall and the web would get destroyed every few days just from general usage, and Charolette would just build it back, fresh and new by the next morning.

I personally don't mind spiders, and at most will evict them from my home. I don't kill them though. While I can kill bugs too, that's *all* they do, and they're a bit more effective at it than I am, simply because I don't spend all day doing it.

My sister in law on the other hand will scream and run from the room at the mention of a spider, and her husband (my brother) isn't much help either. I was always the one removing bugs as a kid. *shrug* Everyone reacts differently I suppose.

The reason insect spirits don't particularly scare shadowrunners anymore, is because the second we get the inkling that we're going near a hive, there is a sudden investment in Ingram Valiants, Steel Lynxes, Gyromounts, Hardened Armor, Ex-Ex, C12, WP and, if you're ares, sub-tactical nuclear devices. Bugs don't scare us because the rules allow us to pay to make them less scary.

So shift the paradigm. Don't think Aliens, with a bunch of marines wasting scores of aliens with Mil-spec weapons.

Think Alien. In an enclosed environment (say, an oil rig is a good analog to the Nostromo) then you don't need scores of bug spirits to make runners shit scared. You only need a few, but preclude the use of heavy weapons, and if you need to, find some way to remove weapons from the runners. Say they're on their way back from a run, heading through the south china sea on their way back to Honk Kong. A bomb explodes, there's a leak, they run out of fuel, whatever. Then they come across a dark oil rig in the mist. And maybe they're out of ammo for the big guns, maybe they didn't bring them, but if you really want blow their boat up and make their heaviest weapons sink to the bottom of the ocean. Then they have to climb an oil rig and deal with the bugs, sans the usual armament.

Sir Psycho made some of the points I was about to. To make it interesting, the Alien/Aliens approach works. Bugs plus environment as the adversary can make for an interesting game when you didn't bring you bug hunt gear or had no idea that bugs were the ultimate target. Running low on ammo, no chance of rescue, desperate situation kind of stuff can be entertaining especially if the party initially had an edge.

There is always the use of non-conventional bugs, like the bug spirit/animal merges happening at the Ares facility in Threats 2, I believe.

Something else I thought of, but I think the average player has become a little jaded about the bug issue. How many average runners (especially big city ones) have actually come across a large scale infestation and actually had to do something about it. Sure the player may have had to clean out a hive, or off an aspiring shaman before he really got rolling, but the your newer character prolly has never seen about bugs. They probably have a good dose of legitamate information and an equal amount of rumor, hearsay and, misinformed garbage that they have never needed to put to the test. Most of my character's knowledge of bugs came from Suki Redflower and Karl Kombatmage.

Hmm..... Now I need to figure out a way to have my current group backed into a corner, down to the last magazine, with no way out, only to be saved by the Mantis who hired them to find the hive. Maybe when they get to Denver.

Well, in my game, i ran bugs as "big scary things you'd be better off running the hell away from."

Until there was one that the party encountered. And they chased him off.

Thankfully they realised that he was leading them into a worse area of aurora, and gave up the bughunt.

because anything that can keep pace with a motorcycle while on foot could easily get away in a city of rubble and holes

.....Raid™ Kills Bugs Dead

...including spiders (just not the matrix type)

My brother nearly had a really nasty car accident when driving down the highway one of these

http://www.amonline.net.au/factSheets/images/huntsman.jpg

crawled onto his face while he was doing 100km/h. After he finished freaking out and killing the thing, then got back up to highway speeds another one did it. He decided they where conspiring against him, and almost a month later his car still smells like insecticide.

Personally, I'm okay with spiders/snakes/ants/whatever so long as they are not physically crawling on me. At that point death begins for the insectile race. Except flies, because thats a losing battle if I ever saw one.

I had snake and spiders crawl over me, but at those times, I was either too tired to do anything about it or dead to the world, my buddies freaked out though.

Speaking of Bug In A Car one of my buddies has a car that is simply infested with everything up to poisonous centipedes. Understandably she's been reluctant to drive anywhere in that thing. We are currently looking for a room fogger to clear out the nest.

And I'd like to go on record stating that hairy bugs either gross me out or go "awwww" I think my response is related to whether or not it's near me or behind ballistic glass.

I've found a nice flavor touch is make the critter such that it breaks some basic rule the player assumes will always hold, and apparently can do so as part of its nature. For instance, I was running a game where the party is paid big bucks by the military to visit Montauk Island, New York. Apparently the government has been playing with some sort of power generation technologies and something went weird. As the players progress into the base, they find scientists who have basically had parts of them 'fall out', as though their skin simply ceased to hold it in. They find 'bubbles' where if they press a stick in, they see the stick in the bubble apparently from every angle (so within the bubble they see the top, bottom, back, front and sides of the stick). There are animals like giant predatory cats that charge at them and parts of them fall in and out of being. The basic plot was something went wrong and the experiment sprayed pieces of four dimensional space into a three dimensional world, including all the critters that happened to live in that four dimensional space. The animals could step 'around' things, but three-dimensional creatures, when they hit a bubble of 4D space, would suddenly find their body is not built in the fourth dimension such that it keeps all their important bits in.

I described it better during the game. It's the only game where the party turned back on a job. They never did find what was at the bottom of the base...