Help - Search - Members - Calendar
Full Version: Bugs are scary
Dumpshock Forums > Discussion > Shadowrun
Pages: 1, 2
DocTaotsu
Runners vs the Fourth Dimension? I should hope they did!

Runner 1, calling over his shoulder: "Hey, any of you multi dimensional physicists?"
Team: "Uh? No?"
Runner 1: "Okay. Means we can't learn anything, lets go home. Watch out for the bit of... cat thing"
Blade
While thinking about insect spirits yesterday, I suddenly realized that all insects aren't necessarily the big bad thing we tend to consider them.
Take bees for instance. Sure, they sting and it hurts. But they do a wonderful honey and, above all, we need them to pollenize. Without them (and sadly they're getting massively killed by pesticides) it'll be much more difficult to grow some plants.
Einstein said something like: "If the bee became extinct, man would only survive a few years beyond it"

I take it that insect spirits are more like dark and ugly things taking the appearances of giants bugs, but I'd like to develop that idea of symbiosis or good insects to make the situation a little less black and white.

DocTaotsu
Lady Bug Ally Insect Spirits?

That would make Insect Spirits a lot more interesting. Particularly if you were able to blend the line between ZOMG evil and Vital to Nature.
Blade
Great idea the ladybug: a natural born killer, 150 victims every day!
Fine in a bug spirit's hive... But what then?
martindv
QUOTE (Blade @ Feb 13 2008, 10:08 AM) *
Einstein said something like: "If the bee became extinct, man would only survive a few years beyond it"

Apocrypha.
FrankTrollman
If Insect Spirits had their way completely, they would wipe out all of humanity and all the dogs, and all the antelope, and they would cover the world like a plague of locusts without beginning or end. They would blot out the sun and that still would be not enough and they would endeavor to travel to other worlds and blanket them in the bodies of their servitors. And they would turn on each other once and again until just one hive crawled its mastery over the entire cosmos. It's kind of like unchecked capitalism.

But just like Wuxing is entirely willing to make concessions to the rule of law and works to provide safety and education to the working classes within their areas, an insect hive is willing to rationally make concessions to the needs of humanity and other hives in getting however much it believes it can get. And indeed, when it comes to mutual threats like Horrors and Shedim the Insects are willing to work with us in reasonably good faith. Just like Wuxing's "ultimate goal" (getting all the money) would destroy human civilization, Hive Iktvtik's "ultimate goal" involves no humans being alive. But Wuxing's immediate goal (making as much money as possible out of the present economy) is an essential component of the world economy, and Hive Iktvtik's immediate goal (getting the best possible growth and safety for their hive in the material world) can fit quite seamlessly into human civilization and global defense.

---

Something I've been giving serious thought to is Shadowrun in the year 5000, set at magic apex shortly after the Earth's horror invasion. With nearly 3000 years of technological and magical development, the Sol Defense Force is basically playing Star Trek. The opposition is mostly coming from other space faring groups. And one of the things I've been thinking about is how differently the insects would behave in the defense of Earth (where the remaining hives have bought into metahuman society) than they would on worlds where they just plain won outright.

So you'd have stellar empires to worry about which would seriously be planets that were taken over completely by insect spirits and now want to invade Earth, and planets that were taken over by horrors and now want to invade Earth, and planets taken over by Shedim who now want to invade Earth. And on Earth itself you'd have a portion of the population who were flesh forms and they'd go in there and fight along side the cyborgs and metahuman magicians who made up the rest of Sol's fleet.

-Frank
Blade
I have to admit I was a bit surprised, but it came from what I thought was a reliable source... Thanks for correcting it anyway.
Kanada Ten
They talk about the normalization of insect spirit and metahuman relations a little in Target: Awakened Lands, where those born under the certain sign go off to live among the Termite people when the time comes, as if it was the most normal thing in the world, and the Termites don't randomly snatch people of the tribes or otherwise work against them.

I worked a version of this into a Glow City campaign, where a nest of fly spirits worked and lived in peaceful coexistence with the inhabitants of the Dump, helping sort garbage and recycle, only taking the losers in gladiatorial combat as new hosts. My players were somewhat disturbed by the idea, by the normalization of it, and refused to go back to the place (which was annoying, because I had a few pages of plot hooks for it - which not so ironically became garbage that I plan to recycle).
Moon-Hawk
QUOTE (Rail @ Feb 13 2008, 12:52 AM) *
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.

I don't know about the Alien 3 approach. That was the worst in the series.
DocTaotsu
Actually, isn't that more Alien's Ressurection? Or are you just talking about the basic premise of "People trapped in military base and being eaten by nasty thing(s)"?

Didn't actually mind Aliens 3, but Ressurection made me kick a puppy.
Kanada Ten
The Bunraku topic got me thinking about bug beetles, you know simsense recorded by people undergoing host investment and transformation, even "life as a bug" BLTs. Peeps get so addicted to feeling like a flesh form, they go out and find someone to turn them into one...
Fortune
"We want ... FLESH!
Flesh Form Fantasy."
Kanada Ten
QUOTE (Fortune @ Feb 13 2008, 10:25 PM) *
"We want ... FLESH!
Flesh Form Fantasy."

"Listen, doll, I know ripping their heads off after you do it is kinda your thing and all, but it's killing the simrig feed the second you sever the neck... Couldn't you just start eating him alive or something, you know give us a little more time - OK, OK, rip the heads off. We'll just FX something in post. Ready? OK, bring in the next John..."
- On the set of My Mother was a Mantis
Fix-it
I find that bugs are scarier than Horrors, mostly because as a whole humanity realizes that we are a drop in the proverbial universal bucket that is existence.

bugs, on the other hand, are a pure evolution of cold, emotionless, evolution: eating, breeding, expanding. repeat. it reminds us of where we came from. something we'd like to forget.

Off-Topic:

that "fourth dimension" idea is pretty awesome.
so is the fly spirit/garbage idea.
we need a repository so people can post plot hooks and story lines.
a 'la Shadowland. wiki style.

I don't like where those last few posts are going. time to call in the Napalm, methinks.
FrankTrollman
A hive queen will authorize any action which she believes will promote the survival and growth of her hive. If that means fighting a war, she'll do it. If that means not fighting a war, she'll do that.

Outside of Taliban lands, relatively few people throw stones at promiscuous pretty ladies. So once the bigger picture of metahuman society has been explained to the Queen (who is crazy smart and learns very quickly), she would be entirely willing to authorize flesh forms to create social connections. Ie.: go to bars and have sex with random dudes to spread the news.

-Frank
Moon-Hawk
QUOTE (DocTaotsu @ Feb 13 2008, 09:01 PM) *
Actually, isn't that more Alien's Ressurection? Or are you just talking about the basic premise of "People trapped in military base and being eaten by nasty thing(s)"?

Didn't actually mind Aliens 3, but Ressurection made me kick a puppy.

No, I genuinely believe Resurrection was better than 3.

Alien 3 starts by killing two interesting characters just so that they can be replaced by generic, uninteresting ones for the sake of making Ripley "all alone" again. It's basically Alien again only not as well done, with a generic "slasher film" plot without any real creativity. Not to mention the fact that at no time did the Alien queen in Aliens have access to the dropship while she still had her egg-laying butt-thing. Remember when she killed Bishop she had already abandoned her egg-laying organ. And even if she did carry an extra egg with her how did it get from the dropship, out of the hangar bay, and into the cryo chamber of the main ship after they escaped? Furthermore, even if it did scuttle it's way into the cryo-chamber (bringing it's egg sac with it, mind you), how did it implant Ripley without breaching her cryo-pod? The only time she could possibly have been implanted was in Aliens when she was sleeping with Newt (not like that), and it somehow implanted her then let go, all without disturbing her nap, and yet for some reason Newt was not implanted (even though we know there were exactly two of them), and the face hugger did not die afterwards, and for some reason was still trying to implant her after she woke up.

Resurrections only real flaw was that it had to build on a foundation of Alien 3, so it was hard to make any sense from the beginning, but at least it had some interesting characters and something that wasn't a simple rehash of a previous movie.

Explain to me when and how Ripley got implanted with that queen and I'll revise my opinion to, "Alien 3 is tied for worst Alien movie, being just as bad as Resurrection."
Zombayz
Doing a bug run based on Alien/Aliens would actually be a really good idea. I've seen it done for DnD, and the players were scared of anything that scuttled, dripped, or climbed for weeks. I know, I was one of them. The DMs trick was to isolate us from everything(as already suggested), and force us to run low on supplies of every sort. Applied to SR, you'd use up slap patches and ammo when you get attacked (always a hit and run attack), not to mention your team getting jumpy and shooting at anything that moves. The aliens could also 'snatch' a team member from the back without anyone noticing with luck.

And imagine the BTLs and simchips you could make from this! So much cash paid just to know the feeling of having an egg laid in your stomach, then then the tearing sensation when it hatched. I sense big money.
Adarael
QUOTE (Fortune @ Feb 13 2008, 07:25 PM) *
"We want ... FLESH!
Flesh Form Fantasy."


That's one of my favorite Billy Idol songs, but seriously, since Double Exposure came out?
That's all I ever hear. It's become a bit of an in-joke with my gaming group.
Adarael
Also, I hate double-posting. Son of a bitch.
Fortune
QUOTE (Adarael @ Feb 15 2008, 07:29 AM) *
That's one of my favorite Billy Idol songs, but seriously, since Double Exposure came out?
That's all I ever hear. It's become a bit of an in-joke with my gaming group.


biggrin.gif

I'd never heard it before (the joke, that is), and couldn't resist posting it when it came to me.

Better than ...

"Dancing with my elf
Oh dancing with my elf
Bust some carromoleg
And took my date down a peg
Now I'm dancing with myself
O-oh-oh"

wink.gif
Limited Infinity
QUOTE (Sir_Psycho @ Feb 12 2008, 08:59 PM) *
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.



My players actually did this for me. I had them raid a nest to rescue some others. They ended up being captured and their weapons confiscated. A grenade was launched into their pile of gear and most of it was destroyed smile.gif . Now they have to get out of the hive with minimal gear. Should be good.
DocTaotsu
Alien 3/Ressurections=Probably better if they hadn't.

Those were both deeply flawed movies, I think it's just a matter of what annoys you more. The Alien movies have always been "Ripley vs The World" which is why I hated Ressurections because it was "Robo Ripley" vs the world. The fact that Ron Perlman got to kill someone with a coffee thermos was really the only high point. I also thought the alien/human hybrid thingy was freaking awful to look at.
Aliens 3 did kill off two interesting and compelling characters for reasons that I'm sure go beyond thematics, but yeah... I forgot how angry I was to see that. I was just glad they let the android get in a few lines before killing himself.

eh... oh well. I'm convinced it's not going to get much better than Aliens.
This is a "lo-fi" version of our main content. To view the full version with more information, formatting and images, please click here.
Dumpshock Forums © 2001-2012