The Bugmen - Aboriginals of the Red Hive
Wonder: The Red Hive: one of the last functional bugmen hives in the world. It is the size of a small mountain, built out of a plaster comprised of local red sandstone and the salivary excretions of a now-extinct caste of builder bugmen. A number of chimneyed minarets rise a hundred feet up into the sky were built originally to ventilate the Hive Mother and her eggs, but now they serve to maintain a cool and comfortable temperature for an interior bazaar operated by foreign traders.
History: Long before the humanoid races arrived on this world, before even the Otum or Kobtum had learned to stand on hind legs, Titania was ruled by a race of eusocial insectoids known as the Aboriginals. The Aboriginals erected mammoth hive citadels all across the planet, each housing hundreds of thousands to perhaps a million souls. These artificial mountains of plasterized rock and saliva were the only bastions of civilization on Titania for eons. Despite their extensive history, to nothing is known about Titania's aboriginal ages, as the insectoids did not develop writing until it was introduced to them by the humanoid races. Their society was believed to be alien and primitive, even by Titania's standards, as technological innovation moved at a virtual standstill over millennia of Aboriginal occupation. All aboriginal endeavor was fixated on the singular goal of ensuring the continued survival of the Hive Mothers and, by extension, their species.
The Hive Mothers were analogous to queen ants and bees on Earth. They were immortal beings, whose roles were to procreate and give guidance to their multitudes of children. The Hive Mothers commanded a primitive but powerful magic, and were capable of telepathic communication with all their children that fostered a profound maternal love within each of the Aboriginals. The Aboriginals lived and died in glad service their Hive Mother.
But the Aboriginals ultimately failed in ensuring the survival of the Hive Mothers when the Ghul arrived on Titania. Arrivals from another world, or perhaps monstrous demons that had forever lived deep under Titania, the Ghul were sadistic superpredators resembling giant corpulent grubs. Gifted with powerful command of magic and malign intellect, the Ghul easily bested teeming hosts of fanatical yet simplistic Aboriginals and reached the Hive Mothers in the inner sanctums. Their defeat was followed by violent episodes of gluttony as the Ghul devoured the Hive Mothers one by one. The loss of their Hive Mothers was felt by all surviving Aboriginals in the form of an agonizing trauma seared into the consciousness of the entire species known in their language as the
Krzgagt: Great Sorrow. The Ghul were not satisfied with the consumption of the Hive Mothers, and used their magical prowess to enslave the leaderless Aboriginals to perform their bidding, whether that meant sending the Aboriginals to war against rival Ghul or simply ordering them to cast themselves into their open mandibles to be eaten. The Great Sorrow ended only when the Ghul had eaten their fill and left Titania, leaving only a fraction of the original Aboriginal population in their genocidal wake.
With their Hive Mothers gone and their population decimated, the surviving Aboriginals were left hopelessly adrift. In the absence of the Hive Mothers' leadership, the survivors attempted to rebuild what Hives remained and care for what remained of the Mother's Brood, the vast stores of Aboriginal eggs laid by the Hive Queens as insurance against catastrophic depopulation. Though millions of eggs remained and could be preserved indefenitely, without a single living Hive Mother the brood was still finite. Once the eggs had all hatched, there would be no new procreation of the Aboriginals. While the eggs could be rationed for a very long time indeed, the species was ultimately doomed.
For a time, the surviving Aboriginals attempted to stave off their inevitable decline by rebuilding their hives and looking to their defenses. But with the arrival of humanoid races on Titania, who were more inventive and aggressive, the Aboriginals were soon outcompeted. The humanoids took to calling the Aboriginals bugmen, viewing the native sentients as beasts to be enslaved or cleared out of the way. What few hives remained were almost all destroyed during the rise of the humanoids.
Today, only a handful of hives still remain standing, and of those even fewer are populated by bugmen, mostly in unsettled and inhospitable parts of Titania. Among those is the Red Hive, situated within the desert badlands of the southern continent. Though a shadow of its ancient glory, the Red Hive is still ruled by the bugmen, who have learned to adapt to and coexist with the humans, orcs, and elves who now occupy this world. The Red Hive serves as a caravan waystation for traders crossing the deserts. Proximity with the humanoids has cultivated adoption of their cultures and ideas, although they are fanatically devoted to protecting the sovereignty of one of the last remaining bugmen hives and what is likely the largest egg brood anywhere in the world.
Word has reached the bugmen of the Red Hive of iron islands in the seas to the north, bearing another wave of newcomers to Titania with fantastic technology. There is some hope among the bugmen that these newcomers could use their wondrous technology to revive the Hive Mothers, a hope tempered by numerous tragedies wrought by new arrivals to the world they once dominated.
Flagg
Kassarock
TokyoPewPew
Mae
Tlaloc
