Lady Beetles
By Dan Norder
© 2003
First thoughts
Last time around I didn't have a personal
introduction to my column. I don't plan to talk about myself often,
but the short blurb on me is that I have a lot of interests, like
mythology
and folklore, photography, science, web site design and management,
and coming up with ideas for fiction (RPG scenarios, books, whatever)
that I just don't seem get around to writing with all of the other
projects keeping me busy.
This column is basically an excuse for me to present some of
those concepts so other people can take them, modify them as needed
and use them in their own games. To keep things a little focused,
I pick a topic each time around, mention some facts related to
it that I think are interesting, and then present related ideas
that can be used in as many genres as possible. As I go along,
I also toss out links to web sites that might spark a few other
ideas. When all is said and done, hopefully something I present
here can be used by someone out there to add some personality
to a PC, provide a plot for an adventure, or otherwise make a
contribution to their next game.
The topic
Some guests moved in with me for the winter. They just showed
up unannounced about a month or so ago. I'm normally not such
a pushover, but I knew that trying to tell them to leave was a
lost cause. And of course they won't pay any rent, which isn't
surprising since they are normally homeless. But at least they
usually stay out of my way. Usually, but not always. One of them
pressed her luck last week and wandered off into an area of my
place that she had no business being in. If she'd have bothered
to ask I would have told her going there would get her in trouble,
not that she would have listened. And now she's dead. She just
got in my way and I killed her. It was her own stupid fault, so
I won't apologize for it. I don't think her friends know what
happened to her. They might suspect something but haven't asked
me about it. If they don't care, why should I?
No, it's not the opening monologue of the latest in experimental
film
noir -- but if you like that idea, hey, run with it
-- it's what happened when some lady beetles got into my apartment.
The multicolored
Asian lady beetle is a generally orange-colored insect, but,
as the name implies, can come in variety of hues from yellow to
black. It makes a nuisance of itself in certain parts of the U.S.
(and perhaps elsewhere) in the late autumn by trying to get inside
houses to wait out the winter. Some people refer to them as Halloween ladybugs because they look a little
like pumpkins and come out during that season.
I had about ten of the buggers get inside my place, which is
a new personal record but small potatoes compared to less fortunate
individuals. Some people report thousands of them swarming over
their houses and getting everywhere inside. They get so many that
they have to vacuum them up. Seriously.
Trying to squash them isn't a good idea, not because you need
to be worried about their bites if they bother to fight back,
but because their blood smells pretty nasty and can leave stains.
In fact, they'll start bleeding on you even if they're just scared
and you haven't done anything to them, as my cat Emma found out
when she tried to sniff one. Yes, that's right, it's an animal
whose main defense is that it'll bleed all over you if it feels
threatened.
In looking for things to base gaming ideas on, we can branch
into some facts about the more famous red ladybugs. One of those
is a rhyme, variations of which exist in many countries in Europe
and North America:
Ladybug, ladybug, fly away home!
Your house is on fire, your children all gone,
All but one, and her name is Ann,
And she crept under the frying pan.
The standard explanation of this verse is that ladybugs live
on hop vines, which were burned after harvest to clear them out,
and the children don't have wings yet so can't fly. A theory more
popular among folklorists, myself included, is that it refers
to the lady beetle being a symbol of the sun, based upon it's
shape, coloration, and flight, not to mention all the old myths
linking beetles to the sun, most famously in Ancient Egypt. This
seems to be supported by some of the earliest versions of the
rhyme that end not with a mention of Ann but by telling the beetle
to fly out from hell into the heavens, which is exactly what the
Ancient Egyptian sun god was thought to do each morning.
Some neo-pagans believe that humans originally worshipped a
benevolent Great Goddess who was run out by evil patriarchical
societies bent on erasing the old history, and a few of those
people think that the ladybug rhyme is intended to be a secret
code that the old goddesses were burned as witches, except for
this "Ann" who is in hiding and will reveal herself
to those who have faith. That interpretation seems just as likely
to be complete nonsense as the supposed secret feminist meanings
to Ring
around the Rosie. (That poor children's game seems destined
to attract all sorts of ridiculous wild theories.)
Story ideas
Last time around I used a lot of space on ideas that could
be used in horror games, so this time I'll spend less time
on that genre. But here are some quick thoughts: Starting to bleed
anytime you are scared sounds like a pretty nasty curse to put
on somebody, and watching it happen to someone else without knowing
why could be really creepy. There could also be an rather uninspiring
looking Ancient Egyptian scarab amulet that was among
a collection of an artist when he died. Perhaps a relative could
have inherited it and, thinking it was just a failed one-off piece
of pottery, painted over top of it with red (or orange), white
and black pigment so it now looks more like a ladybug. This would,
after all, make a great gift for a child... except for that nasty
secret curse on it, of course. It wouldn't have to be a curse,
it could have some beneficial magic that protects the kid from
some other nasty force that would otherwise be after him, or maybe
it causes psychic dreams, or whatever works in the storyline.
And it's also entirely possible that there's someone out there
looking for it -- cultists, the stereotypical walking mummy, or
whatnot.
A fantasy game
might have tiny little fairy-like creatures ride on ladybugs.
The pronotum (the armored covering that shields most of
the head, on the Asian lady beetles it is white with a W-shaped
marking) is probably large enough to hold a tiny saddle. Certain
types of spellcasters (typically the short, nonhuman ones) might
have a ladybug for a familiar -- or perhaps two or three, to make
up for the lack of power compared to others. The spray of foul-smelling
blood might even suggest a monster that is made of a cloud of
animated blood.
Additionally, the concept that there is a goddess (or god)
in hiding after another set of powerful entities killed off the
others of her kind might be worth exploring. If your game has
clerics (or the equivalent), how exactly could they be worshipping
a hidden deity and not let the secret out of the bag? Would they
not show off their own powers? Not let anyone know they are a
cleric at all? What if there were a group of these hidden gods?
What would happen if the balance of power shifted so that the
old gods were back and the new ones overthrown?
The idea of having a group of ladybugs acting as familiars
for a spellcaster became the concept for a major superhero
genre concept. Researchers in artificial intelligence and robotics
are currently trying to model insect intellect and social organizations
instead of attempting to mimic complex human psychology. What
if one of these experts made a design breakthrough and decided
to give these roughly fist-sized biobots some personality by making
them bright red (or orange) with black spots? Then she could take
the codename Ladybug. Depending upon the needs of your game her
creations could be nearly realistic in their technology or full
of fantastic powers. They could be used as scouts, sending back
video and audio signals of what they encounter. Their mandibles
could be a collection of wire probes that can rearrange themselves
to provide interfaces to a variety of computer ports and hack
into computers through USB connections as if they were a real
user typing at a keyboard. Chances are they won't fly on flimsy
little wings like real ladybugs (unless they are as small and
lightweight as the actual biological ones), but they could have
little air jets, or perhaps fly through some superadvanced force
field manipulation. If they are in a world with super powered
villains and trying to compete at that level, the force field
technology could also act as invisible shields (to protect their
human leader), tractor beams, and so forth. And, in grand comic
book tradition, the scientist behind it all could be good at coming
up with gadgets for all sorts of situations. You also have your
obvious plot seeds, like robots that go rogue, evil forces wanting
to exploit the technology to their own ends, and all that.
The interesting thing about the idea of flying robots is that
you could come up with ways to use them in low tech modern
action sci-fi as well, such as what was popular in TV shows
like Knight Rider, Viper, Airwolf, and so forth, in which
the star and his or her organization are typically the only ones
who posses such gadgets (barring special circumstances with enemies
who make great villains for season cliffhangers) and go around
busting common criminals. You wouldn't want to make the bugs too
powerful for games based upon these kinds of shows, but taser
guns, pepper spray dispensers and electric shocks are certainly
acceptable for the genre and not too unbelievable. Heck, back
in the 1970s the CIA was actually working on a secret project
to attach a listening device to an artificial dragonfly to try to eavesdrop on
remote targets (which, strangely enough, is eerily reminiscent
of the plot of a children's book published around
the same time, if not before). In the years since that early attempt
spy agencies undoubtedly already have much more advanced models,
just judging based upon the sort of amazing contraptions businesses have announced to the public.
If you like steampunk sorts of games, you might take
the Ladybug scientist character and turn her into a member of
the British upperclass who happened to create an artificial beetle
(or a group of them) using some anachronistically advanced clockwork
mechanism. Plastics and other modern materials are probably out,
but you could say she has super lightweight metals with handcrafted
precision components, and maybe some artificial gravity paint
on the underside of the wings thrown in for good measure. I'd
think you would want the beetlebots in this case to be larger
than fist-sized to fit in with the setting a little better, but
you probably wouldn't have to go much bigger than two or three
times that. The dynamic between the expected activities of proper
ladies in that period versus the behavior of an adventurous woman
who associates with strange men and is surrounded by little mechanical
insects would be fun to roleplay around. I'm already picturing
a society ball where the stereotypical British butler announces
each set of guests as they arrive and gets to read from a card:
"Lord Greystoke and Lady... BEETLE?"
There's also a few more conventional sci-fi ideas to
round out the genre coverage. There could be alien bugs that are
not carbon-based life forms (silicon is the standard alternative,
but I'm sure others could be used as well) so have a chemistry
so incompatible with humans that simply being near them can be
dangerous, perhaps because of a superheated liquid that acts as
blood in their systems. Reflex bleeding goes from bothersome to
deadly when it can boil metal off a bulkhead or eat right through
a spacesuit. There might also be a situation where some alien
creatures instinctively swarm in (like Asian lady beetles do over
the winter) and hide inside some vital equipment, like a spaceship
engine, transporter emitter array or something along those lines.
If disabling some technology temporarily would help the storyline,
it adds a lot more character to the game when it's caused by,
say, an infestation of sulfur-spitting Inferno Beetles picked
up from that fringer space station you just visited instead of
just another random bit of technobabble, like Star Trek's magical
tetryon particles that do whatever is needed
by the writers for plot purposes each week.
The pop quiz at the end
And that's it for the brainstorming from me this time around.
Feel free to toss out more ideas in the forum section below.
I'm also interested in hearing what you think about the column
concept and structure in general. Are there genres that haven't
been mentioned yet that you'd like to see included? Would it make
more sense to focus on one genre per column rather than jumping
around to lots of them, as I've been trying to? Do you like lots
of short ideas to choose from, or would you rather see more time
spent developing an idea most of the way into a full scenario
concept, kind of like the end of last month's column? Should I
spend time discussing how to come up with the ideas in the first
place, or how to string them together before or even during a
game? Are the graphics I've been including worthwhile? Does anyone
click the links included throughout the column, and, if so, do
you find them useful? And, most importantly, anybody use (or plan
on using) something from one of these columns in a storyline?
Be sure to check back next time to see the results of the forum
comments. You might get lots more of the same kinds of ideas on
a different topic, or maybe it
will end up being something completely twisted...
