D&D General Hive Mind Evil?

[Umbran]

Thousands I'm guessing.

Okay, then "some" is rather unclear, and a pretty major understatement. That's the equivalent of several villages of humanoids. And it would have taken.. well, an army of humanoids roaming the hivemind's lands for days to weeks, destroying nests of the things, engaging in pitched battles.

So, they didn't "kill some". They went to bloody war with them.

Which is fine, but would have been nice for the scale to be clear up front.

They don't plan on farming humans they're protein right here and now. If they say depopulate northern Gaul they have enough land to return to previous behavior.

I think we often have language use issues. Earlier, you said the queens think the humanoids are the resources - implying the humanoids are supposed to be what keeps the hivemind from starving. Now, you mean the land are the real resources.

PC actions can prevent this.

Yes, but I betcha my solution isn't yours.

We do agriculture because it produces far more food per square km than hunting and gathering. If the basic problem is now the insects have too high a population for their land to support, they either get more land, or increase the amount of food they get from their land.

So, some humanoids go in and farm, increasing the output of the land several times over, easily supporting themselves, with extra for the hivemind

Or... go in and kill the queens. That's the usual adventurer way to handle such things.

 

[Zardnaar]

Okay, then "some" is rather unclear, and a pretty major understatement. That's the equivalent of several villages of humanoids. And it would have taken.. well, an army of humanoids roaming the hivemind's lands for days to weeks, destroying nests of the things, engaging in pitched battles.

So, they didn't "kill some". They went to bloody war with them.

Which is fine, but would have been nice for the scale to be clear up front.




I think we often have language use issues. Earlier, you said the queens think the humanoids are the resources - implying the humanoids are supposed to be what keeps the hivemind from starving. Now, you mean the land are the real resources.


Yes, but I betcha my solution isn't yours.

We do agriculture because it produces far more food per square km than hunting and gathering. If the basic problem is now the insects have too high a population for their land to support, they either get more land, or increase the amount of food they get from their land.

So, some humanoids go in and farm, increasing the output of the land several times over, easily supporting themselves, with extra for the hivemind

Or... go in and kill the queens. That's the usual adventurer way to handle such things.

The land can support millions, if the hives take it with say 20 000 minus war casualties they could probably feed for a while on than.

France had a population of tens of millions more than Iberia, UK, Italy put togather.

The hives don't have to support millions. They can also let the farm animals go feral and feed on them once no humans.

 

[Tonguez]

Insectoid hive mind vs humanoid culture have made clash in a lot of story.
It is beyond good and evil.
hive mind may don’t have any understanding of concept like family, friendship, love, hate, good, evil, or the like.
it is good for hack and slash, or sometime a very high level of philosophical debate.

Humans in mobs also demonstrate the same Swarm characteristics as insects, hence the origin of group think and mob violence.

Conversely ‘individual behaviour’ does exist in Insects like Ants and Bees.
Bee Scouts when they return to the Hive after identifying a food source do different dances effectively ‘debating’ which direction the Hive should Forage in. The Bees then take a vote by headbutting the loser so that they stop dancing at which point the whole colony joins the winners dance.
Ants do a similar thing using pheromone trails - the ants who has put the most work into its trail wins.

Interestingly Starling swarms form clusters of 6 (each individual just moves with the nearest six birds and thus the whole swarm is coordinated), Locust swarms also form into smaller clusters within a larger swarm mass, with those falling out of a cluster formation having its hindlegs bitten until it falls back in to line.

The point being that in intelligent insects, even those with a literal Psychic Hivemind, there is no reason why group concepts like Love, Loyalty and Good and Evil cant develop. Using the cluster formation behaviour even allows for military type Units or even ‘Friends’ or ‘Family Groups’

IMC Gnomes are eusocial and a clan is linked by a Empathic bond (Hivemind) via ‘shared notions’. ie All the 101 Gnomes in a clan have a vague notion of what the other Gnomes in the clan want or need and when directed to, all of them will act to meet that need.
Acting for the wellbeing of the Burrow is the gnome definition of Love and Good and Loyalty.

 

[Flamestrike]

Mindless vermin are not evil (they make no conscious decision to do evil things). Giant Ants and Giant Spiders are unaligned.

 

[Zardnaar]

Mindless vermin are not evil (they make no conscious decision to do evil things). Giant Ants and Giant Spiders are unaligned.

These ones are sentient at least the Queens and advanced ones.

 

[Iry]

Ants can do a lot of amazing things you might want to consider for flavor including disguising themselves as other types of ants through scent, take slaves, paralyze enemies to feed on later, bringing back dead bodies (or just the heads) or even act like parasites that invade a society to live of of their food and so on.

I agree. Ants are downright inventive in a large scale sense, and are capable of building sprawling empires larger than actual nations. Just drawing on real life ants, there are a number of things they actively do that would be considered abhorrent and evil by our standards, and the standards of the outsiders that determine alignment criteria. They could easily collect you as slave labor, force you to function as cattle, make you tend another cattle species, herd you infront of enemies as canon fodder, wear you like a meat suit disguise, or lobotomize you and make you pick up sticks. No, seriously. That's a thing.

 

[Paul Farquhar]

Is it an actual hive mind with cognition shared between all the individuals in the hive, or is it actually a master/drone set up where a central intelligence (the queen) controls the rest of the hive?

Note that its perfectly possible for a hive to do some of the things we associate with advanced intelligence, such as solve problems, and still have no capacity for moral discernment, or the ability to see others as individuals. In which case, it's alignment is unaligned, even if it has INT 20.

In fiction, your typical evil hive mind (borg, zerg etc) is bent on assimilating everything it encounters. If your hive mind is not like that I would suggest that it is not evil.

 

[Zardnaar]

Is it an actual hive mind with cognition shared between all the individuals in the hive, or is it actually a master/drone set up where a central intelligence (the queen) controls the rest of the hive?

Note that its perfectly possible for a hive to do some of the things we associate with advanced intelligence, such as solve problems, and still have no capacity for moral discernment, or the ability to see others as individuals. In which case, it's alignment is unaligned, even if it has INT 20.

In fiction, your typical evil hive mind (borg, zerg etc) is bent on assimilating everything it encounters. If your hive mind is not like that I would suggest that it is not evil.

Hadn't thought to much about it.
Leaning more towards a shared over mind vs a single will.

 

[Iry]

These ones are sentient at least the Queens and advanced ones.

Do you mean sapient?

 

[Paul Farquhar]

There could be interesting mechanical properties. "killing the queen ends the hive" is a bit of a cliché. But if cognition is shared then killing individuals could reduce the intelligence of the whole. The more die the dumber it gets.

Or, if you want to get closer to real world biology, killing an individual would release a pheromone which turns hive members within range hostile. It might work more like a computer, intelligent but not sentient.