“The Creator, if He exists, has a special preference for beetles, and so we might be more likely to meet them than any other type of animal on a planet that would support life.”
The Autumnal Swarm are a Burroughsian infestation of mental vermin. They wish to control the Eternal City and the Crossroads, and to destroy the World Tree. The swarm is always searching for doors that lead to the crossroads or that lead to places that can be used to weaken the tree. Thus, swarm hosts are often found near doorways to other worlds and waystations to doors.
| Very Rare: | The Road |
| Class: | Fantastic |
| Organization: | Hive |
| Moral Code: | Ordered Evil |
| Activity Cycle: | Any |
| Diet: | consciousness |
| Number: | -12 |
| Level: | +host |
| Intelligence: | High |
| Charisma: | Average |
| Movement: | Host+1 or 16 |
| Attacks: | Host or mandibles |
| Damage: | Host+1 or 1d8+1 |
| Defense: | Host+2, or 5 |
| Special Attacks: | Slo-time field |
| Special Defenses: | Slo-time field, immunity to sleep and telepathy |
| Magic Resistance: | 3 |
| Size: | Any/Medium |
The natural form of a swarm insect is of a strange combination of human-sized ant, beetle, and centipede. A swarm insect may take control of any living, intelligent creature who consents. Their insect form “enters” the host and leaves a crossroads-shaped scar somewhere on the body. This sphincterous scar opens to let them enter or leave as they please. Note, though, that the insect is not physically inside the host: means of looking inside the host body will not reveal the insect, unless somehow it looks inside their spirit. Further, damage to a host does not damage the insect(s) inside.
An insect adds its survival to that of its host; when an insect leaves its host, it regains all of the survival it had when it entered. When an insect’s host dies, the insect will usually leave the host with full survival. Several minutes after an insect form dies, it ripples away across the dimensions, devolving into a gooey yellowish puddle.
Treat the host and the insect as separate opponents for experience purposes. If the characters defeat a host, but the insect leaves and they don’t defeat it (or it defeats them), they’ll get experience for the 5+ level host, but not (yet) for the 5th level insect form.
Hosts must have originally had at least a five wisdom to be a host; a host can have up to one insect inside them for every five points of wisdom. Having multiple insects in the same host will increase the slo-time field (see below) as normal for multiple insects, but will not increase the level of the host or its survival—however, at any point before the host is killed, the insect in control can cede control to another insect, restoring the insect portion of the host’s survival. The insects in this case are considered separate opponents for experience purposes.
The Slo-Time Field
Each insect of the swarm generates a slo-time field four yards in radius. Within this field, time moves half as fast for everyone except the insect. If more than one insect intersect each other’s field, the radius is additive. If two insects come together, the field is eight yards radius; if three come together, the field is twelve yards radius, and so on. Each doubling of the insects inside the field also increases the magic resistance in the field by 1. So two insects have magic resistance of 4; four have magic resistance of 5, eight have magic resistance of 6, and so on.
The effect of the slo-time field is that, compared to others within the field, the insects move very fast. Movement rates are all doubled. When acting against an opponent affected by the slo-time field, the insect gains a +5 to one of attack (which warriors can convert to combat bonuses), defense, or any agility or evasion roll.
Firearms, which rely almost exclusively on high speed to cause harm, are half as effective against a swarm insect or host because of the slo-time field. Firearms damage is halved.
The Mind of the Autumnal Swarm
The Autumnal Swarm are a fractal mind. Within each insect is the seed of the whole. Whenever an insect is within the slo-time field of another insect, they share their memories fractally. Because of this, they each generally know anything that another swarm insect knows. When a swarm insect dies, its last senses are sent in a burst to any other swarm insects within five hundred yards.
Because their mind is so alien, they are immune to telepathic powers and spells. They are also immune to sleep. They are even partially immune to spirit charms such as fear, command, spiritual hold, and spiritual torpor unless the manifestation affects all insects within the current insect meld. For example, if there are three Autumnal Swarm hosts or insects within the same slo-time field, a spiritual hold must affect all three of them to affect any of them.
The mind of the swarm is completely alien. I was recently at a teleconferencing demonstration, where the demo was life-size, live video over the Internet. The quality was amazing, until the bandwidth dropped. Their algorithm—which I’m guessing was fractal because of its behavior—tried to compensate. The result looked life-like with human movements, but took on the appearance of rotting flesh, exposed bone, and life-like eyes within a charred, face-like oval as the algorithm tried to take what it had and rebuild the whole. This is what the memories of the Autumnal Swarm are like. They work; they allow the swarm to learn from past events. But they are utterly alien.
The swarm keep no written record; they know everything that any swarm mind they’ve come in contact with knew at the time. The only writing around a swarm hive will be instructions or notes to be given to their human minions, and will be in that language.
The Goal of the Autumnal Swarm
“We will make the whole universe a noise in the end.”—C.S. Lewis’s demon Screwtape
The Autumnal Swarm eats souls, sucking intelligence and memory into its own alien consciousness. When it does so, it takes over the body of its victim. This is a voluntary process: the victim must accept the swarm. An insect can be bonded with more than one host at a time, but can only be within one at a time, and must physically leave one to enter another.
A soul can attempt to maintain its individuality within the swarm, but it will eventually fail.
The swarm’s goal is chaos, not in the moral code sense but in the entropic sense, the de-evolution of order. They spread throughout the worlds by way of doors and liminal roads, and are the termites of the World Tree.
