Queen Cecelia
You are Queen Cecelia, and the colony is your right. How dare your yet-living sister call herself a queen. She is a deceiver, an overgrown fetus, a demon-in-exoskeleton—but at least she is of royal stock. How dare the peasantry, the livestock, revolt? Do they not know their place? Do they not know they have no purpose but to serve?
For now, you have taken your mother’s place in the royal nursery. Even now the breed-males pamper you and tend to your every need, as is right and proper. Even now, your daughters mature and learn your scent. Soon they will be ready to proliferate throughout the colony, serving you. Soon they will be ready to put down the rebels and expand your influence to its proper width and breadth. Until then, you must remain cloistered, safely protected by those few who remained truly loyal.
It is your purpose to return the colony to glorious order. It is your purpose to rule. You must remind them who is queen.
Aims of the Queen
- Retain control of the royal nursery to ensure the next generation are your own progeny.
- Humiliate and kill your so-called sister.
- Reinstate hierarchical order in the colony, bringing the rebels and revolutionaries to heel.
The Brood
At 1800 hours, your 36,000 daughters will mature. Weeks ago you were impregnated with a dozen, two dozen, three dozen breed-males’ seed and spent many long hours laying many thousands of eggs in the stone coffers of the walls of the nursery from which the colony is ruled. Your daughters have grown mightily in their eggs, and they now crawl around you as larvae, their exoskeletons slowly hardening, their voices slowly coming to them, their noses becoming accustomed to your scent.
They will mature into workers: a noble calling. But it is a time of war. Should you bring the aphids to heel, you can feed one drop of nectar to each of your larvae to induce them to mature into soldiers instead.
The Royal Guard
You are served by six ancient giants, many generations old, whose heads are formed in the shape of great shields. If they position themselves correctly, they can block whole tunnels with their heads; but behind the shield, each is spindly and delicate. Royal guards have 1,000 effective strength, consume 20 food per hour, and die after taking a cumulative 25% casualties in battle, though only one royal guard can be damaged at a time. Every four hours a royal guard spends quartering heals it for 5% of its casualties taken. An example:
[Your army has 3 unharmed royal guards and loses a battle, taking 30% casualties. The first royal guard takes 25% and dies, the second takes 5%, lasting damage—which means it only needs to take 20% more to die—and the third takes no damage, remaining unharmed.]
Royal guards travel at infantry speed, but cannot go off-road. Each can be stationed to defend a hex, spending an hour to use its shield-head to fortify a particular direction. It then confers a stronghold bonus to the defense of all assaults from that direction. Multiple royal guards can face different directions, conferring their defense bonus to attacks from multiple angles, but only one royal guard can confer its bonus in any particular direction. Headless armies stationed in the care of one or more fortified royal guards do not fight with their battle malus.
The Spiders
In ancient times, the colony was infiltrated by a small group of spiders that look exactly like ants. One could stand next to you and you would be none the wiser, until it opened its maw and began to consume you. But as is only right for the colony, it advanced quicker than its predators. Like the aphids, like the grasshoppers, like that subservient ‘queen’, the spiders were trapped, hunted, and by now have been thoroughly domesticated. They have acted as Queen Celia’s secret police for generations, reporting directly to her, but now your mother is dead and no one knows of them but you.
They were always a small group, hard to breed en masse, and in the initial spasms of the civil war many spiders were slain. But not all of them. You still have the services of five loyal spiders, irreplaceable in their infiltration and surveillance abilities and willing to do whatever you ask them to. They, at least, recognize your royalty. You can always send workers or soldiers to perform operations like normal, but as for professionals, you have five.
A spider-led operation costs nectar like normal and involves a spider being sent to a location or attaching itself to an army camp to begin working towards its goal. Spiders travel as skirmishers. A spider operation is resolved with a 2d6 roll like normal, but with the following modifiers:
- The spider gets +1 for another spider’s aid, or +2 as a cell of four or more spiders.
- It gets +1 if its goal is easy, like spreading rumors or keeping an ear out.
- It gets -3 or more for a hard goal like assassination (which it only attempts against a character if there's a special opening).
The Pheromone Net
The colony is laced in layer after layer of pheromones; it is the primary mode of communication between you and your subjects, however distant. All ants can near-instantly communicate with all other ants in the colony through pheromone trails relayed by ant after ant, though it is only the queen who possesses the force of will and religious right to broadcast.
The Others
- Celina. Your sister, who is foolish enough to call herself queen, and who conned many workers and soldiers into following her into rebellion. She would be better served by killing herself, with the decisions she has already made, like falling in with that upstart breed-male Hofmann. She truly is a soulless demon—born to destroy the colony that is yours by right.
- Consort Hofmann. A breed-male who has entranced a good number of his fellows, as well as your worker-sisters whom he has fooled into thinking they might be deserving of royalty themselves—this, too, is the fault of your sister and her ill-conceived rebellion. He and his coalition have taken control of much of the industry in the colony; he has great influence with the factory overseers and engineers, and even the millipedes have taken a liking to him, for he has bewitched them all with promises of parliament and liberal economy. Export the colony’s goods? Ship away the fruits of your people’s labor to foreign lands? That is all needed here, in the colony stockpiles, and this rebellion only proves the truth of your feelings. You cannot eat shares or steel.
- Chancellor Karolina. An upstart aphid who has forgotten her place so generously granted. Does she not understand how good the aphids have it? Does she not understand how vital they are in your colony? She and her fellows have grown spikes, entrenched themselves in the aphid gardens, and are trying to force your hand by preventing your access to their nectar. Perhaps your sister will be stupid enough to make concessions to the aphids, in the hopes of gaining their support in usurping you? This cannot be allowed on either account; they cannot get a further taste of independence.
- Queen Zsófia. A weak queen of lesser birth, dependent on your colony for generations due to her weakness—though she has, in the past, been an acceptable administrator. She is also sure to have her own eggs, her own larvae, though in the chaos of your own birth, the most recent scheduled delivery of her daughters (eighty per cent of the brood) was never delivered to the nursery. She is sure to have kept them for herself. What foolishness! They are likely soon to mature. If you are able to bring them to the nursery before they do so, you can accustom them to your scent and claim them for yourself, as is right and proper. So long as Zsófia casts aside her visions of independence and delivers to you the larvae that are rightly yours, she is deserving of clemency.
- Melchiorre. An animal unchained. He and his fellows rampage throughout the colony, screaming their desires for all to hear. Their greatest demand: your death, and the death of your children. They are few in number, but each of his locusts is gigantic, larger than the royal guard and rivalling the millipedes. With any luck, Melchiorre and your sister will kill each other, and you can clean up the pieces.