Back before I stopped listening to Radiolab (because every
single one of their shows eventually becomes about death, and it began to bum
me out) I really enjoyed one of their episodes about emergence—how simple
systems, including the behavior of individual insects, can yield surprisingly
complex results and even problem-solving behavior when these entities work in
concert.
And so we have the hive mind beetle swarm—a species whose
control over electricity is such that, when coalesced into a swarm, they
operate as a psychic magic-wielding, CR 13(!) creature so intelligent (Int 15)
it can communicate with other electricity-users and even read divine portents
in thunderstorms.
Of course, all that is dependent on having a critical mass
of hive mind beetles swarming together in the first place. And while PCs shouldn’t feel guilty about
eradicating these lightning-charged horrors—they are ravenous consumers of
mammalian flesh—they will be put in the odd place of murdering a mind well before
they stamp out the swarm that constituted it.
A blue dragon
uses a hive mind swarm as a sentry, spy network, and lair cleaner (the hungry
bugs are very thorough). Early on the
blue dragon found it expedient to pose as a thunder god to compel the newly
conscious swarm’s obedience. After a recent breeding cycle, the growing collective
has gained enough sentience that it has begun to question its master’s divinity
and his right to rule them.
Aboard a wandering
starship, a crew of android biologists experimented with using a colony of
hive mind beetle swarms as a kind of living computer. After the ship crashed on a medieval world,
one of the swarms got loose. The three
remaining swarms still inhabit the downed vessel, fed by the biomass the ship’s
nanocollectors continually assemble for them.
The swarms have crude control over some of the ship’s systems (including
internal doors, lights, and certain mechanisms they operate as traps). If interlopers breach the vessel, the swarms
use this control over the ship as leverage to gain their freedom.
A hive mind beetle
swarm seeks to enter a college of the psychic arts. This raises several questions, both
philosophical (what constitutes a person versus a mind?) and practical (how do
we keep it from eating the other students?) in nature. The shedu psychic who runs the college seems
inclined to allow the swarm to audit, but given his centuries of experience and
the beetles’ facility in locating lost artifacts, his long-term plan may be more
subtle than the education of insects.
—Occult Bestiary
29
It’s been a while since we had an Occult Bestiary monster!
I’m spending New Year’s at a fancy private school in New
England…whose guest Internet access blocks nearly every useful site on Earth,
including Tumblr, Blogger, and even Paizo and Google, apparently. Guess how amused I was to discover that at
11:30 PM last night…
Note that this entry actually came out 12/31/16, but I backdated it for nerdy organizational reasons.
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