[OOC] General Discussion

I thought everyone might enjoy this and I cleared it with BedzoneII prior to posting it
--- with that said I hope you all enjoy this:

Question: I know insect spirits are bad but why are they bad?

Answer: Take a cockroach. An average, ordinary, everyday cockroach. Real tough bugger to kill, as they can survive nearly everything including toxic levels of radiation and is, what, about an inch long at most and often smaller? Now make that bug the size of a Troll, with the Dermal Deposits and Chitin that implies. That is just ONE TYPE of Insect Spirit. Got that part? Good. Now here's the next part: They see Meta-humanity the same way Locusts see grain.

Addendum: Which is why the Ares meta-plot (current) hooks are so good. I actually decided to get my players to accept a Shadowrun HorrorRun in which they are food being placed in a testing facility for Ares to test their insect program. They are not the infected, but the food. With the possibility of infection as they are also testing how dangerous releases could be. After they get done feeling like the locust lunch grain store I let the genie get out as it were, and they were then "conscripted" to help Ares (who just used them as food, again, as they now had unique skills against the hybrid) put the genie back in the bottle. Genie being a queen hybrid with some inspiration taken from Sil in Species, Dren in Splice etc, Alien(s) etc.

To say the least Bugs are horrible, and great for putting the fear of the Paranormal back into your players. Whether we call them Insect Spirits or Invae they are nasty, predatory abominations ripe for use by Storytellers who enjoy a bit of Horror in the 6th. And if you ever feel like running a retro adventure. Universal Brotherhood. Amazing run that. Bug City is likewise an amazing piece of Shadowrun writing and/or just a great source for creating your own series of plots.

Also have you ever seen the 1997 movie Mimic -- Three years ago, entomologist Dr. Susan Tyler genetically created an insect to kill cockroaches that were carrying a virulent disease. Now, that insect has evolved and out to destroy their only predator, mankind.

--- Another interesting tid bit

Why are insect spirits the only ones that work the way they do? Why aren't there, for example, evil Wolf shamans summoning wolf spirits to take over human bodies? That would actually be a pretty badass alternate version of werewolves: The shaman summons an alpha or den mother spirit (queen) who then spawns wolf spirits to inhabit captured hosts. A less zoologically-themed totem could produce creatures largely indistinguishable from demons. If it's a matter of a particular kind of alien spirit that merely takes the form of insects, then why do they do that? Why such a specific restriction?

On top of that, the existence of Spider as a non-monstrous totem is a weird edge case that highlights the issue. True, spiders aren't insects, but again, why does that matter? They're still arthropods, just as alien to humans as ants and fireflies, and arguably closer to human comprehension than some of the more primordial totems like Sun or Leviathan; you could argue that those are more about how humans perceive the things they represent than their inherent nature, but you can say that about any totem. Why does the line get drawn exactly there?

So the insect spirits are really just alien spirits that happen to take the form of insects, and are the precursor to the coming of the Horrors, so if you do not like them, well, you ain't seen nothing yet. So any theories on why they do that, or is it just 'Alien Spirits, who the fuck knows why they do the shit they do'? This also lends credence to the speculation in Street Magic that there are no actual insect 'totems' per-sae, and their shamans are just contacting alien queen spirits who want to be summoned into our world.

Well, basically, those of us who can remember back to the days of FASA will also remember the links to another FASA game, Earthdawn. The Earthdawn lore was that these insect spirits were just a specific kind of alien dimensional entity that arrived at our world after being chased away from their own by the Horrors. Insect shamans do indeed worship individual queen/mother spirits as opposed to having general totems. But Earthdawn is set in the 4th World, after the magic rose so high that Horrors began to cross astrally to our world and eat/drive insane everything that did not hide out behind magic barriers but the magic declined so that most of these Horrors could not sustain themselves and died (or went home). So welcome to the SR 6th World, chummer, as magic becomes more and more powerful one can expect the Horrors will return -- and the insect spirits are just the precursor.

Still FASA made numerous tie-ins between the two games, certain Immortal Elves in Earth Dawn turned up in Shadowrun, like Harlequin. Same for some of the Dragons. So that means there are those knowledgeable about the Horrors of course that was FASA and they are no more.

This fits with the SR computer game that came out a while back as well.

Are the Translate and Animal Translate spells simply variant versions or completely two different spells? Aka if I know one I basically know the other and just have to choose which version I am casting?

I can just see it -- And Sarah gets busted before she even gets to Japan :) end of adventure

And what does the computer have against Mind Probes -- that is two horrible rolls by two different players -- could it be more than coincidental ;)

Pretty sure our Sarah as more ressource than a patrol bot ;)

That being said, could a be used to tell the Patrol IC to declare a false alarm or something like that?

Okay thanks for the clarification on that

waitwaitwaitwait...I can use spoof on an IC?????

I'm not sure, hence my question :p

is it just me or does that dice roller seem to roll a bit low ;) -- I know there nice and about the only real way to handle things in a PbP but random number generators are not truly random -- no such thing -- they are at best just pseudo-random

as a software engineer I once tried to create a good nearly random number generator the complexity of doing so was a bit more than I could handle and I was talking to a mathematician about it -- so pseudo-random is about the best we can obtain and in doing so only hope that the results are not skewed -- which is always an issue with these tools

Found this interesting reddit post comparing init and actions economy between SR5 and SR6

Is the way they count the number of minor actions accurate for our game?

Man flying can be such a pain these days ;) especially when you ping the radar because something nasty transpired on or after your flight ;) and make no mistakes while Japanese are polite they still do not like Gaijin or anyone that is not a normal oriental person that could pass for being native Japanese -- Shadowrun's (if ran per guidelines which it may or may not be) Japan is rather xenophobic or I would put it more xeno-prejudice

Good luck guys ;)

cool hi all