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Description
The first of the technology guides for Charans/the Swarm. The first ideas looked too much like terrestrial insects. A trip to the beach changed that a little. Now I'm looking at nudibranchs and goose barnacles for ideas, colors, and pieces of anatomy to steal, in combination with the trilobite beetle larva. Colors include bright reds, purple, blue, and various types of day-glow brilliance - too often I've seen the alien swarm monsters in brown and green, but the "bugs" they're often compared to are offered up in a wide of array of wondrous colors, and the Charans took most of their cue from producers in the sea and on the shores of their tropical world.

Structures ought to resemble unearthly coral reefs or barnacle piles mixed with rock and swarmed over by small creatures. "Single" animals are often groups of symbiotic organisms: a clicker drone, for example, is no less than five animals working in concert. Its forelimbs and head are one creature, its bipedal gait a whole other organism, its armor plates are two organisms working in concert, and it is connected to the hive (and its human controllers) by its own "spineworm" variant buried in the back.

Description
The first of the technology guides for Charans/the Swarm. The first ideas looked too much like terrestrial insects. A trip to the beach changed that a little. Now I'm looking at nudibranchs and goose barnacles for ideas, colors, and pieces of anatomy to steal, in combination with the trilobite beetle larva. Colors include bright reds, purple, blue, and various types of day-glow brilliance - too often I've seen the alien swarm monsters in brown and green, but the "bugs" they're often compared to are offered up in a wide of array of wondrous colors, and the Charans took most of their cue from producers in the sea and on the shores of their tropical world.

Structures ought to resemble unearthly coral reefs or barnacle piles mixed with rock and swarmed over by small creatures. "Single" animals are often groups of symbiotic organisms: a clicker drone, for example, is no less than five animals working in concert. Its forelimbs and head are one creature, its bipedal gait a whole other organism, its armor plates are two organisms working in concert, and it is connected to the hive (and its human controllers) by its own "spineworm" variant buried in the back.