"When Hive Queens Die, Do Fighters 'Go Ronin' (Mercenary)?" Topic

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A) In your universe, do the remaining now master-less "hive" warriors just sit down and die?

B) Or are there any that would try to seek honorable employment elsewhere, among the victor's other enemies ("enemy of my enemy is my friend")?

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ronin

Note: If so, would that give a player a good background excuse to incorporate small mercenary units from "hive" races (insectoids, etc.)?

C) Or maybe they'd rather go down in a suicide commando attack all on their own, seeking revenge against those who killed their master?

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Just curious.

Dan

Another grub is raised up to become the new queen with the same loyalty the warriors gave her predecessor. There is no sitting down the die. The hive must survive!

Sorry, I meant with queens and all queens-in-waiting killed as well. Basically, no longer any future as a hive.

Though I guess that kidnapping a queen-in-waiting from another colony might be an option. But that's another story. :)

Or they could capture young from other colonies, or even other races (Borg-like), to become future workers. But eventually all original hive members would die off.

Or they could capture cloning scientists …

But, in the meantime, would some warriors go out and earn their bread elsewhere?

Dan

In the Aliens universe, I believe that the warrior/drones can cocoon a victim to turn them into an egg, and that pheromones or some such will make the egg become a queen if no queen is in the area. (There's some deleted stuff from the first movie and from fluff elsewhere.)

One of the Aliens comics has a pretty twisted storyline in which a human captive becomes a slave to the drones.

I'd have the drones go into a hyper-violent rage, in which they either get killed or quickly burn themselves out.

As for bugs in other armies--why, they're weaponized xenomorphs from Weyland Yutani, of course! (Roll a D6 for the experiment to go horribly wrong: on a 1-6, they turn on their human masters.)

It varies considerably from one species to another. For example, the Ch'zzt warriors will fight until slain; moreover, the workers will proceed doing whatever they were last commanded until they starve. The Ungubugul may be imprinted upon a new leader if one acts promptly, and possesses a sample of the requisite pheromone. The aquatic Vrakau females, on the other hand, fall upon one another with a will, each seeking to become the new queen.

Ron

While I have oft played the Alien(s) style, I'd probably have them go feral, though less than ferocious. Instincts over intelligence, but always 'listening' for direction.

Doug

Pheromone or EMF control/even payment sounds like an interesting option. Fool them into thinking they're working for a new queen.

Or handwavy science says that a warrior that hasn't been exposed to queen/related signals within x days/weeks begins to develop into a viable queen herself. A hive's queen keeps her workers/warriors from also going royal by continuing to emit the proper (all is well) signal.

It's going to depend on your biological premise for the Hive. If the Hive are basically mindless drones controlled remotely by the intelligence and transmitted instructions of a central queen, then the drones will either go inert or follow the very last set of instructions (as in, "turn right" or "shoot") until each runs out of food/energy. (So imagine one drone spinning around in a circle, another zooming off at unstopped acceleration, another sitting still and shooting at the same point, whether there's a target in that location or not, etc.).

If the control is less dependent, the drone might follow more complex instructions, such as continuing to pursue a specific target without regard to any other tactical changes, stopping only when destroyed, out of energy, or the target itself is destroyed, at which point the drone falls inert or follows a homing instruction.

If there is no direct remote control, the drones, if instinctive, will continue to follow their instinct; e.g. attack a threat, gather food, build structure, etc.. If intelligent, the behavior will depend on the level of intelligence or instinctive behaviors. Whether this behavior is geared towards self-preservation or species/society preservation also depends on the structure of the hive society. Will it gather around a new queen, try to become the new queen, imprint on the victors as the new queen (that could be fun), try to escape (the crazy ant routine)… lots of possibilities there.

I like the idea that they go feral but over time, they decay and degenerate.

I go with stupid feral. The queen serves as all of the higher functions. The drones are smart enough to sort out basic things (attacking, gathering food, making additions to the hive), but without the queen, none of those basic tasks are well organized (so a queenless hive will for it's brief unhappy existence will start to sprout random new construction without there being a real need, the food harvesting parties will still gather food, but they'll simply deposit it in one of the storage chambers, vs the ones nearest where workers need food. There will be no true swarm attacks nearly as much as each drone spots something that shouldn't be in the hive on it's own, and attacks as it can rather than en masse).

If we're talking bee-level of "hive", well, I'd expect the entire hive to either die out, or for another queen to develop for whatever reason.

As for bugs in other armies--why, they're weaponized xenomorphs from Weyland Yutani, of course! (Roll a D6 for the experiment to go horribly wrong: on a 1-6, they turn on their human masters.)

Ant colonies generally have a number of fertile females who can, at any time, mate with a male and turn into a queen, so it really shouldn't be an issue.

If the colony has been depopulated to the point that there aren't enough breeders left than said colony is effectively destroyed and the remaining handful of individuals will just go about their mindless, robotic tasks until they die.

What if the survivors are captured young by a different species (perhaps even by humans)?

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Privateer4Hire: "Pheromone or EMF control/even payment sounds like an interesting option. Fool them into thinking they're working for a new queen."

Parzival: "imprint on the victors as the new queen (that could be fun)"

Any other thoughts on this, the rest of you?

Dan

As for bugs in other armies--why, they're weaponized xenomorphs from Weyland Yutani, of course! (Roll a D6 for the experiment to go horribly wrong: on a 1-6, they turn on their human masters.)

Sir! You win the thread!

re: Captures

Depends on the hardness of your scifi. I like to keep my spacebugs as terrifyingly unknowably different. I think it'd be very hard for something so alien to adapt to being part of something equally alien to its home/origin.

I could see enslavement by like-species (the ant example posted is actually a really interested read!) but I tend to view the hive as one organism vs the drone as a distinct animal.

Which I went as far as to start writing an analogy about taking loose drones being an analog to someone taking a still largely functional arm off of a dead person to attach to themselves, but that actually sounds pretty awesome as a different sort of alien (the other-other kind of body snatcher).

Regardless the still thriving hive would likely either cannibalize the surviving drones from a dead hive, and potentially partly occupy the now defunct hive as an outpost. The militant expansion at the cost of all cooperation external to the hive is something I'd have imagined ingrained into the collective spacebug DNA for all time.

(Also it's a handy explanation for why the hive might overrun and occupy a human colony, eliminating both competition, acquiring food and hosts, and it's a safe place for larvae and storage).

Panzersaurkrautwerfer,

I really like how you think!

What if humans, or another species, impregnated or implanted a number of drones and warriors with something that functioned like the Cordyceps fungus, and replaced their basic instincts and reasoning with a different set of parameters?

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Dan

I think that gets back to Weyland Yutani dice rolls. If we're going evil, slave labor (or "indentured servants" and possibly "colonial contract laborers") is much easier to manage and train. If we're going high tech, robots may go crazy, but they go crazy in defiance of programming. We don't have a biological process we have to fight into submission first.

This is science fiction. There's no wrong answers. Having pet aliens controlled by a fungus, or otherwise confused by technology is an awesome setup for either an outbreak, or excuse to put leashes on Khurasan's Space Demons and use them as "xenobiological site defense products"

To my end of things, my chittering bug horrors are…like closer to lovecraft only with science. They're mostly centered on a colony world with a very mysterious exploration history (or rather, verdant, and welcoming, just, expeditions kept disappearing). Eventually signs of a previous civilization are found, much digging and the like ensues, and hey look now there's all these crazy face eating things pouring out of the earth.

So to that end I favor unending, incomprehensible hostility. The bugs ate an entire civilization. If the last guys couldn't figure out how to put a saddle on them, then we're not as likely to figure it out in a short manner.

When the Queen dies, the Warriors move a small group of eggs to a new chamber, then they feed a special jelly into the eggs much like bees feed Royal Jelly to a select group of eggs/lava which in turn hatch out as queens!

First one that hatches then destroys all the other queen carrying eggs, if two were to hatch at the same time then the two would fight each other until one is dead, then the survivor would destroy the remaining eggs.

That's why all eggs must be destroyed!!

@Grignotage

"weaponized xenomorphs from Weyland Yutani, of course! (Roll a D6 for the experiment to go horribly wrong: on a 1-6, they turn on their human masters.)"

OK, I literally laughed.