One of my favorite bits about Shadowrun in particular is that directly alongside this futuristic world of cyberdecks and prosthetics and automatic weapons, are fully fledged hauntings by things like bug ghosts and big fuck-off actual dragons (one of which owns a corporation) and other mystical crazy shit.
I’ve played a bunch of Cyberpunk 2077 but I haven’t gotten my hands on RED, so I don’t know if it has something comparable. But it sounds like you’re describing an Invae nest. Notably, bug totems are the only sort of spirit in Shadowrun that requires a sacrificial host to manifest, and bug shamans will capture people in order to infest them with bug ghosts which will gestate like xenomorph babies.
The hivemind behind these Invae are pretty much a perfect slot-in for your gestalt locust swarm if you wanted, and they’re only interested in one thing: breeding grounds. Would be an interesting moral choice for your party. It’s a powerful entity and it can do or offer many things but its price is always going to be several corpses. Not necessarily your own, or corpses of innocents, it doesn’t care about that, but it wants live bodies that will then suffer greatly and then die. And then after they die they will release many little bug ghosts, which are a nuisance at best and highly deadly at worst. The bugs ate Chicago back in 2055.
One of my favorite bits about Shadowrun in particular is that directly alongside this futuristic world of cyberdecks and prosthetics and automatic weapons, are fully fledged hauntings by things like bug ghosts and big fuck-off actual dragons (one of which owns a corporation) and other mystical crazy shit.
I’ve played a bunch of Cyberpunk 2077 but I haven’t gotten my hands on RED, so I don’t know if it has something comparable. But it sounds like you’re describing an Invae nest. Notably, bug totems are the only sort of spirit in Shadowrun that requires a sacrificial host to manifest, and bug shamans will capture people in order to infest them with bug ghosts which will gestate like xenomorph babies.
The hivemind behind these Invae are pretty much a perfect slot-in for your gestalt locust swarm if you wanted, and they’re only interested in one thing: breeding grounds. Would be an interesting moral choice for your party. It’s a powerful entity and it can do or offer many things but its price is always going to be several corpses. Not necessarily your own, or corpses of innocents, it doesn’t care about that, but it wants live bodies that will then suffer greatly and then die. And then after they die they will release many little bug ghosts, which are a nuisance at best and highly deadly at worst. The bugs ate Chicago back in 2055.