Bug City
Because Frank doesn't have a copy of UB anymore.
Welcome to Bug City
No, seriously, we were going to do Universal Brotherhood, which we suspect has not aged very well, but Frank didn't have a copy but he did have a copy of Bug City...so here we go.
I'm Bobby, and I used to be a Shadowrun fan. I used to be a particularly huge Shadowrun fan, in fact, but like with a lot of things I didn't get in on the ground floor. I did, in fact, not actually get into Shadowrun until the Second Edition, and even then I was young enough that books were accumulated...sporadically, as time and money were available. Keep in mind, this was before I had the freedom and disposable income to basically buy anything I wanted off the internet. If the game store didn't have it, you couldn't buy it. Even if they did have it, you only had X amount of dollars, and that would not buy all the books. So while writers might like to think that you're reading everything in order, the fact is that any given gamer's collection pre-Bittorrent erra is likely to be...eccentric. You played with the books you had, not the books you maybe wanted to have. Works well for GURPS, not so much for Shadowrun with its ongoing metaplot.
So, that's a long story way of saying I actually originally read Bug City long before I read Universal Brotherhood.
Conservation of nerdjitsu.
Universal Brotherhood is almost universally looked back upon rather fondly. I'm not sure how well it holds up, it's been a while since I've seen a copy and that's another OSSR altogether. Today we're going to talk about Bug City, which is where the plotline from Universal Brotherhood eventually went. While UB hit all the right notes for most people, and the next step was the novel Burning Bright that is one of the better regarded pieces of game line fiction you're liable to read, the next step to Bug City is... more contentious.
People like Burning Bright.
The story involves the Insect Spirits. They are basically Shadowrun's version of the Aliens from Aliens, with a little bit of the cultic magic from Games Workshop's Genestealers thrown in (the fact that the Genestealers are also ripped off of Aliens is not a coincidence). It was all worked in to how Shadowrun magic was supposed to work, so you basically get a shaman who summons the spirits, and then sticks them into the bodies of living victims, who then turn into bug monster gross hybrids. No real reasoning is ever given for why a shaman might want to do any of this, we are pretty much told that they are “crazy,” which since this was the early nineties is about as much motivation as most villains got so that was that.
The Universal Brotherhood kicked things up a notch by having the bug shamans working in secret behind the scenes in a self-empowerment cult that was a bit on-the-nose as a Scientology expy. The shadowrunners were tasked with tracking down a missing person for way too little money, and with shocking ease they discover the human trafficking, the mass human sacrifices, and the tunnels full of rubber suit monsters that they then get to have a proper dungeon crawl wiping out. It's paranoid, it's gross, and people remember it fondly as both a spy thriller and a dungeon crawl.
The big reveal is rather spoiled by the front cover.
Here's the thing though: the player characters don't actually dig very hard to find the mass murder, cannibalism, and pointless mutant army of degenerates. The players basically pull at a few loose ends and scout out some facilities and become totally convinced that the world is under They Live style invasion. It just isn't very well hidden. But you're still on your own, because the Scientologists Universal Brotherhood have strong
lawyers and can totally issue Youtube takedown notices, and otherwise stop you from going through official channels. That doesn't make a lot of sense, but it fits the flow of the narrative of the thriller they are presenting you with in Universal Brotherhood. Burning Bright kicks it up a notch again, where the Universal Brotherhood have kidnapped and murdered enough people to form an army under the streets of Chicago and a secret strike force has to wipe them out with a nuclear bomb without telling the public to avoid a panic or something. It's a novel, and it's fairly well written for the genre, so you mostly just sort of go with it.
But here's where a lot of fans get off this train: none of that made a whole lot of sense if you take a few steps back and try to work out how it all fits together. It's an engaging story, but it's kind of a house of cards. Bug City is a setting book that talks about Chicago after the alien invasion and nuclear blast and now the city is surrounded by a wall to try to quarantine the bug monsters who can both burrow and fly (don't ask me how that's supposed to work), and now we're supposed to make our own stories from these legos despite the fact that none of them really fit together in the first place. None of this shit held up to scrutiny, because it was all Alien allusions and Scientology metaphors. It was never intended to make literal sense, it was a god damn story. Well, two stories. But you know what I mean.
The thing about insect spirits is that they're taking totem animals...maybe a little too literally. People that have Lion as a totem actually growling is one thing, but having Roach as a totem and you start eyeballing Little Sister as a place to lay your egg invest your spirit is bizarre.
The thing about Universal Brotherhood is that it was set up from book one; the UB are referenced in the original corebook back in 1st edition. They were a background element as ubiquitous and kinda-invisible as the United Santas of the Salvation Army. So it was a good reveal.
I'm going to go against Frank on one or two things, though. Burning Bright was not a great novel. It was written by Tom Dowd, who was one of the big noises in the first edition and a great guy, but it wasn't...great. It also requires you to wrap your head around one of the weird things about RPGs: while you the player have read the rulebook and know how the physics and metaphysics of the world work, your characters don't necessarily know all that shit. So you can see a lot of stuff here and there that makes no damn sense from a game mechanics standpoint, but they go through it because it's a novel. You can, in fact, see plenty of characters in novels do stupid shit that makes no sense, like trying to turn an ork back into a human or stopping Goblinization in fetuses...look, novels are where authors get to play with the setting.
Shadowrun had a lot of magical threats. They were “bad” and that's pretty much the only motivation most of them ever got. Toxic Shamans were given a little more to work with (you get your choice of being a poisoner who is a Captain Planet villain, or an Avenger who is an eco-terrorist villain from a Michael Crichton book – and if neither of those sound all that nuanced, it was the fucking 90s), but the Bug Spirits never got any semblance of a reason to do anything. All they got was a look and feel. Which was that they kind of looked like this:
Now... if that seems almost comically unsuited to do subtle infiltration or the story where “no one believes they are secretly evil” then... um... yeah. Tonally it didn't really mesh up all that well. Victims got turned into Kafkaesque giant cockroach people because Scientology was metaphorically a hive mind, but it's all very magical realism and not the kind of thing you were ever expected to consider any deeper than the fact that it was gross and you wanted to stop them.
So a lot of people had their brains break about Bug City, because now we're talking setting rather than narrative, which means that it runs headlong into the problem that fictional history has to be believable in a way that real history or action thriller narratives do not. We are talking about the aftermath of man-eating alien monsters donning ridiculously thin disguises, taking over local government, convincing everyone to love them, and then getting into a scrap up with super ninjas that destroyed most of the city. All without the common folk ever really figuring out what was going on. It sounds exactly like the kind of thing that would be a plot point in a comedic children's cartoon because it was.
More organs means more human.
At this point I should probably mention that I was one of the authors of the Chicago chapter in Feral Cities, which is this book two editions later. (I was cited by a young law student in their paper about zombie apocalypses and squatter's rights because of that chapter!)
So, the big gist of this book is pretty straightforward: Chicago was crawling with insect spirits. To stop them, a nuke was set off, which didn't kill all the bugs, and the city was mostly evacuated except for people that thought Mad Max was a positive lifestyle choice.
The difference is, I make this shit look good.
It's basically an excuse to do Dark Sun in Shadowrun.
This book presents the basic destruction of Chicago (fourth largest metroplex in North America) as both a fait accompli and a big secret. The first part was sure to piss off any players who happened to have their Shadowrun games set in Chicago (it could happen, Changeling was also a pretty decent book and was set there). The second part is just teeth grindingly non-sensical. When major cities get devastated by disasters natural or man-made, there is a lot of confusion, but it's pretty fucking implausible to suggest that the whole thing might get covered up by the government.
Happy Devil's Night.
The actual suggestions on how to use this book are also a bit thin on the ground. The introduction suggests:
Which is a long walk to say that um... maybe you could do something like Escape From New York. Or something. It's a decent type of setting for something like The Purge Anarchy, but it's hard to come up with a reason for mercenary superspies (that is to say: player characters in Shadowrun) to want to interact with this fucking place at all. There's a mission where someone will send you into devastated Chicago to [Do A Thing], and when you are done (and inevitably double crossed and left to die inside the containment zone, and subsequently escape and take your revenge), you will leave. And never come back. Because the place has a “devastated economy” and obviously no industry or research or anything. Super spies do not break into refugee camps unless someone on the outside is paying them to.Bug City wrote:Shadowrunners might find themselves caught inside this terrible, lost place, desperately trying to get out. They may be hired by those lucky enough to be on the outside but who lost or left someone or something valuable enough to retrieve. Even more so than in the other dangerous cities of the Shadowrun world, Bug City offers tremendous opportunities for profit and death.
You can't even go the District 9 route with all this. Because in Shadowrun, magic items are not transferable, which means there is no advantage at all to be had in stealing alien tech. If the insects have any material culture, there is no purpose to be served in taking any of it for yourself. And the rich creepy people outside know all that, so there is zero reason for anyone to hire the shadowrunners to steal any alien super tech or whatever.
Every creative decision made with Bug City would have been better if it had been the equivalent decision from District N9ne instead.
You could, if you were of a suitably libertarian/crazy survivalist bent, suggest that players might like to go to Chicago specifically because it has little-to-no government oversight but still has enough infrastructure to be attractive to those in favor of indoor plumbing. Which is basically what we did with Feral Cities, but there we at least had the benefit that the government was no longer holding Chicago under active quarantine. No, for Chicago in Bug City days, you have to break in to the radioactive, Insect-infested Mad Max hellhole, and then break out again.
It's...not an uncommon issue with Shadowrun, to be honest. We talked about this with the Two Tirs; it's not enough that getting to place X is an adventure in itself, but what the fudge are you supposed to do when you get there? I'm not saying that they never address this issue in Bug City, it's just that there's very limited amounts of stuff you would actually want to do there.
This book is 151 pages split among 6 sections. We will try to do one section per post. Hopefully I will be able to maintain sufficient anger to get through each of them in one go.
Also, I think it needs to be said - this book is from 1994, and looks better than a lot of books in 2015. It may not have glossy pages or photoshop, but the art is fine black-and-white (okay, yes, there's a color section, but the less said the better), and you can read everything instead of getting a migraine from the font. There's maps and things. It may be silly, but I like the old layout a lot better than some of the new ones.
I should remind everyone at the onset that insects creep me the fuck out.