Sci-fi setting features a "bug race" as the primary antagonist

Okay then why did you make it sound bad fucking punk ass bitch

>kangaroo
>planet hopping

Carlos!

...

I had a concept for a highly collective and eusocial bug race that mostly traded in slaves. Whenever they encountered a race they'd engineer a variant of their worker caste to serve as slaves (with whatever convenient legal fiction required to make it work on their planet). There was a lot of paranoia about these being infiltration units and that the bugs would flip some biological switch and take over. It all came to nothing as the slaves were so thoroughly engineered for their role that they would always die rather than betray their owners.

The thing was the slaves were intended to sabotage other societies but not directly. Basically the Bugs were underdeveloped due to going through a few thousand years of industrial warfare to unify their society. Since they didn't really produce anything they wanted, but they desperately needed things other people made they hit on the idea of selling slaves.

The basic idea is that the bugs noticed that species that evolve competing for dominance in small social hierarchies value the sense of power over another extremely highly, often over their own well being, and occasionally over the long term health and survival of their society. The sabotage comes in that they hope by normalizing slavery to impair the efficiency and social cohesion of competitor species.

I wanted to explore the idea of what might happen when a species where the family or the tribe being is the default unit of social organization meets a species that is adapted to work as a mass society on an instinctual level.

Also, because the whole thing is inspired by the Opium Wars, the bugs will all be vaguely English.

tl;dr nobody cares

Yes, but I'm drunk.

Cheers!

Star Frontiers.

>In fact entomologists like to describe ant hills as functioning more similar to that of a single organism of many individuals than as a hierarchy comparable to other social animals like pack animals and primates.
That's a really interesting way of thinking about it. Similar to how our bodies have chemical signals that travel throughout it, all the pheromones and whatnot ants leave behind make it almost like their habitat/environment is their body. One "entity" made up of a bunch of mobile "cells". That concept could be applied to a lot of things I think, just replace a chemical signals with anything that represents information. A bunch of mech-insects leaving barcodes all over the place, perhaps? Maybe little LED lights that emit some funky wavelength so they could see the signals at a distance? Ooh! Maybe the mech-insects could magnetize the metal in the ground, turning portions of it into a low-capacity hard drive.

I like how they did the Xoronn from SE:V. It's a nice contrast when you have the Xi'Chung in the same game, who ARE your average take-no-prisoners war-mongering consume-everything hivemind.

>We
no, someone else did, not you.

Yeah, the concept of superorganisms is an interesting one, particularly when people play about with it - there's been ideas about humans also being a superorganism when you consider the array of microrganisms living symbiotically with us, and also ones about human society as a whole being a superorganism (although that gets a bit more into social theory/philosophy than just biology).

I have a feeling like this relates to the actual topic of a bug race somehow, but I seem to have lost where I was going with this.

If there was no hivemind bug race, how the hell could Humans win a war against overwhelming odds by killing the leader of the alien race? Only a single bug queen and mindless drones that are useless without her makes sense for story purposes. Hollywood taught me this.

You don't know if they worked on Alien or not.

>Whining about insect superorganisms

>Ignoring best superorganism

something something abandoned basic AI-controlled defense platforms.

Who could ignore a species that has achieved immortality?

Because we subconsciously know that the moment that we start messing with them, they will all rise up and destroy the mortal realm. So we leave them be, allowing them to float along endlessly in the oceans,content to leave us be so long as we leave them be.

They've been around longer than any other animal, just waiting for an "intelligent" species to evolve and start eating their predators.

>Good Lord, can't anybody do anything interesting with the bug race aside from making them generic space goblins?

I find the bug hivemind race the most original and accepted sci-fi theme of all times, everything else are just space monkeys with different things taken from humanity and expanded wether they make sense or not.

Hiveminds are truly alien to us, but yet they don't need that much explanation and can be easily understood by readers.

>planet hopping

"Antagonists"

Here's one example

...

This is pretty neat.

I have a concept where the bug race uses 3 castes, low, mid and high. Low being the primitive tribes of the planet and in some cases spiritual leaders of the planet. Mid being the commonfolk and engineers and a large portion of the military. And high being the diplomats and nobles. All citizens are connected telepathically to their queen who they in some cases believe to be a god and use pheromones to display emotion or speak to each other.

>Just exclusively occupied with eating and reproducing
Like any other non-sentient animal, eh?

why not

Clever, I like it.

>Bug race is actually very civilized on a collective level and seeks mutual cooperation with the earthlings.
>Uses human DNA to breed a new strain that spends several human decades in a larval form capable of individual thought before reaching maturity and assimilating into the hivemind as a new queen.
>Of course it's also sexually compatible with humans as well.

Is this a good justification for blue alien space chicks?

This is one of the things I really liked about Mass Effect. For once the bug aliens aren't just mindlessly agressive. The last Rachni queen is well aware that an attack will lead to her species extinction.

>do anything interesting with the bug race aside from making them generic space goblins?

ftl.wikia.com/wiki/Races/Mantis
ftl.wikia.com/wiki/Slug

That's been around since Enders game. The war was a misunderstanding and the bugs wanted peace. The mindlessly aggressive ones were every human who wasn't Ender fucking Wiggin.

Man, I loved Endless Legends' take on the whole bug swarm race. Yes, they pretty much needed to eat others to survive, and most of them don't have the mental capacity for much more than eating, but their leadership was more than willing to speak to and negotiate with others.

I don't get why more settings don't have their bug races kind of intelligent like that. A mindless swarm of spacebugs is pretty readily understandable as an antagonistic faction, but when they can clearly reason and communicate but still try to eat anything it becomes a lot more menacing and alien.

You mean like Alan Dean Foster;s Commonwealth series where the insectoids and humans are so closely entangled as a community they consider their species one species with two phenotypes?

Thranx.

>An Alien race that resembeles our bugs which means it's not have to be the same thing
>They will probably be much larger then our bugs, so more brain
There problem solved

Screw you

A larger body usually needs a larger brain to control it, they'd need to also have way oversized heads. Also a different way of breathing. And be made of a different material because otherwise they'll just collapse.

And what's the point?
Why describe them as space bugs, then ? You could just make them truly alien in appearance instead (or arachnoids if you want to keep the general look).
Making them look and think like bugs give the PCs a canvas to work with.
Same reason why almost every fantasy setting uses the same races instead of having Houffui travelling across the great Hiuzp and batlling the Oofhgz with their Graou, or why you don't make a gun used exclusively to eat.

Unless you're trying to have a part of your campaign dedicated to assumptions and first impressions, it will just confuse people and make rp harder.

A bigger brain doesn't make something smarter.

For a moment I thought that was a swarm of cazadores, so I almost had a heart attack.

Don't you know what year it is? Literary contributions don't count these days until you put them into a video game with a cringey 2deep4u story written by autistic software developers.

Bees have individual moods and communicate through dancing. I'd say sapient insects could have individual personalities and even be cute.

Use ganglions for movements and brain for reasoning.

Problem solved.

>mindlessly aggressive
"Maybe they gave up and they're planning to leave us alone."
"Maybe. You've seen the videos. Would you bet the human race on the chance of them
giving up and leaving us alone?"

"Ender, the buggers never attacked a civilian population in either invasion. You decide whether it would be wise to adopt a strategy that would invite reprisals."

Both sides were pretty reasonable for warring civilisations nearly unable to communicate with each other and facing potential annihilation.

MOTE in god's eye
O
T
E

Not sure if valuable trading partner, or cold war enemy to be exploited and crushed.

I like the idea, plenty of potential. How do they keep control of the slave caste/prevent other races from breeding their own and removing the middleman?
Can I have my vaguely English bug-girl maidservant?