The Gothic Tale of a Kwama Heretic

Numerous insects of all shapes and sizes are a common sight among the stars according to science fiction but they can just as easily be found in the enchanted forests of fantasy.

Examples of insectile creatures in fantasy are plentiful and each and every one of them offers something new to dissect and appreciate, however in this analysis I would like to focus on 3 examples from games that I'm sure are beloved and cherished by many.

Gothic art by Tom Thiel.

Source

Creating a hive based swarming species in science fiction is fairly straightforward and since there are many examples of such organisms on our planet they can appear as familiar or as alien as you wish them to be. However the same cannot be said for the fantasy genre where there are fewer restrictions on the biology and behaviour of the organism. Still to me that provides a greater motivation to experiment and generally go wild with whatever creature you're making.

Insectile monsters are quite common in almost every fantasy setting but what is less common are actual eusocial or swarming type of critters. It would seem hive minds express a certain disdain for elves.

Hive based species could and definitely should be included more often in works of fantasy, the tropes which come with them are excellent for any setting be it hi-tech or low-wood. Anything from a swarm of ever-adapting parasitic worms taking over the local wizards and devastating entire towns to industrious but mindless unfeeling swarms of bugmen expanding exponentially across the realms. The Swarm is a never-ending source of carnage and entertainment.

Unfortunately aside from a few early examples of swarms in fantasy the concept has been painfully lacking in gaming, and even those examples owe their existence to being part of a larger well-established franchise (e.g. Dungeons and Dragons and Master of Orion/Magic). In the case of the Klackons they already appeared as "space bugs" in Master of Orion prior to entering the fantasy world of Master of Magic and despite being able to command bugmen riding giant fire-breathing beetles into battle their inclusion wasn't anything special or unique. For all intents and purposes they were just exoskeletal humanoids who got along with each other really really well, that's it.

So were swarming hordes of chitinous beasts an unachievable concept in gaming?

It almost was until a miracle happened in the mid 90s.

Meet the Heretic!

Corvus concept art by Brian Pelletier.

Heretic 2 is a 1998 third person dark fantasy action-adventure game running on the Quake 2 engine and a fever dream of mine since I was 9 years old. I wasn't able to actually play the game until recently but since the moment I saw the screenshots and reviews in local gaming magazines near the end of the 90s I was positively enchanted by the world it presented! It was weird, it was colourful but most of all... it appeared totally untamed! A world of savagery and seemingly alien beasts who roam the land looking for an unfortunate adventurer to devour. In other words pure heaven for childish me.

Professional fantasy artist Gerald Brom was responsible for the creature and character designs which definitely shows when you look at the surreal and unique organisms inhabiting the game's world.

As expected from a primordially wild world such as this one it has its share of bugs.

G'krokon in the game's manual.

G'krokon as it appears in the game.

While the G'krokon are delightfully insectile in design and appear to share traits with a number of different insect orders from coleopterans to orthopterans they're not exactly the main focus of the game or this analysis.

Instead we need to focus on the real multilegged menace of Heretic 2.

T'chekrik in the game's manual.

T'chekrik male in the game.

T'chekrik female in the game.

The T'chekrik High Priestess in the game.

And there we have our bug people civilisation! A bit more humanoid compared to the other critters in the game's world but deeply insectile nonetheless.

The females of the species do appear to exhibit even less arthropodic features than the males but that might be due to their more spiritual and deeply mystical nature. They are after all in essence the ones in control of the hive serving as both political and spiritual leaders.

But we still haven't examined the mothers.

Welcome to The Lair of The Mothers.

The familiar humanoid shape has been shed, all that remains is the insectoid essence, these are the mothers of the hive.

I honestly did not expect to be this pleasantly surprised by the game. What started as a more human take on fantastical bug people ended up becoming a lot more... alien.

But even they are pale in comparison to the matriarch of the hive.

The T'chekrik Hive Queen on her throne.

The T'chekrik Hive Queen's size compared to Corvus.

Inside these breeding chambers we can even spot the larval stage of the T'chekrik species.

T'chekrik larvae.

What appeared on the surface as just another monstrous but largely humanoid species of monsters turned out to be a hive of wonderfully designed insectile society, one that might even be far more civilised and advanced than any other nation or species in Heretic 2's world would like to believe.

Overall Heretic 2 provided the much needed fully 3D creative and unique take on fantasy hives. The question remains however, where do we go next?

To Germany of course!

The Gothic Experience.

In the year 2001 a German video game developer named Piranha Bytes unleashed Gothic, a barbaric medieval fantasy world confined in a third person roleplaying game.

What sets Gothic apart from the myriad of fantasy RPGs released at the time was the sheer brutality of both the gameplay and the world it presents. It is only fitting that a world of brutal violence and grey morality would be inhabited by critters and beasts you wouldn't want to encounter alone in the woods.

Before I start I want to credit and recommend the Gothic Archive and World of Gothic for the Gothic material shown here.

Now then, what's bugging the forests of Gothic?

We have flies, we have giant leech sharks and we have eldritch tick gods. Not bad for a fantasy game that is supposed to be a little more grounded than the other two in this analysis.

The sequel even introduced giant beetle pests!

The mighty Field Raider of Gothic 2.

They look a tad bit more fierce in the game, trust me.

But yet again the true star of Gothic's invertebrate ecosystem is not a powerful solitary predator but rather an organised army of teeth and claws.

Minecrawler from Gothic.

Minecrawler Warrior from Gothic.

To say that I adore these designs would be an utter understatement!

Gothic's minecrawlers look and feel soft, fleshy and leathery... a total departure from what makes most arthropods (insects especially) familiar to us! They invoke both the fear of arachnids and mammalian predators! Long spindly legs combined with teeth and claws typical of large carnivores, empty diseased stare and bony protrusions all over a long leathery sack-like body. There's hints of bird-like traits even! Maybe even raptor? The design is all over the place and yet so perfectly coherent. These creatures make no sense and yet fit perfectly in a world of wolves, trolls and giant chickens. No wonder minecrawlers remain some of the most memorable members of Gothic's bestiary to this very day.

The upcoming remake of the original Gothic will of course feature updated and redesigned minecrawlers which although looking very impressive and imposing lack the uneasy and sickly look of the original critters.

The redesigned minecrawlers of the Gothic remake.

These new crawlers look a bit more at home in the various visual adaptations of Tolkien's work than anything Gothic.

But lets get to the juicy part of the minecrawlers' ecology, their mother.

The Minecrawler Queen from Gothic.

The design is very similar to Heretic 2's take on the insect queen mother trope down to the position and shape of the body and egg-laying "tube". Still it retains the core features of Gothic's minecrawlers, an unhealthy mixture of both arthropod and vertebrate traits and an overall sickly look and feel. Truly a Queen worth bowing down to!

We have yet to see how her majesty will translate into the upcoming remake but I'm almost certain she'll have to lose some of her bloated and slimy charm to fit into the newer more streamlined and cleaner look for the minecrawlers.

And now that we're out of the mines it's time to go back into the mines to examine the last species of today's analysis!

Wake up.

Who would've thought that a land of giant mushrooms, living and dead gods, crustacean bus stations and cat/reptile people could also be the home of one of the strangest and most bizarre-looking species of eusocial arthropods in the entire Elder Scrolls franchise?

The Kwama of The Elder Scrolls 3: Morrowind.

Where to even begin...

Only a year after Gothic beat gamers into loving vast weird fully 3D fantasy worlds Bethesda released what is considered by many as their magnum opus, the third main entry into the Elder Scrolls series, Morrowind!

I'm not even going to try and compare the two games, not only because I enjoy them both equally for very different reasons but also because I fear for my life. So I'll just acknowledge that Morrowind also left just as big of an impact on not only gaming but pop culture as a whole. The main draw of the game was (and to me still is) its absolutely alien world and the even more alien beings inhabiting it. Whereas Gothic presented an unwelcoming and hostile but also somewhat serene and picturesque world of forests, lakes and mountains Morrowind gave you a whole new dimension of ash, decay and alien landscapes to explore and discover at your own pace and lesure.

Among the denizens of this alien world lives a species of eusocial arthropods that while lead a relatively normal life for any social insect species they ultimately appear as anything but normal.

The Kwama Forager, Worker and Warrior castes.

Like most things in Morrowind the Kwama barely resemble any animal we can find in the real world with only the forager caste being similar to various worm animals and many insect larvae. Yet the single most bizarre and unique feature of the species is how they interact with each other when the need arises.

Morrowind Kwama concept art and description by Michael Kirkbride.

The concept of the forager caste using the worker caste in a symbiotic fusion in order to better defend their colony is, to me personally, by far the best idea in a Bethesda game so far! Such cooperation and symbiosis is not unheard of in the real world especially in social organisms but the way this is presented and integrated into an already totally alien and surreal creature design is unlike anything else I've experienced in a game. How the forager manages to control and synchronise with the worker's body while protruding from the rear is beyond me but I won't be surprised at all if the answer is simply through pheromones or some physical connection inside, it just works.

This concept of absolute symbiosis extends to their queen as well.

The Kwama Queen of Morrowind.

Which suggests that the foragers might be the females of the species while the workers are the males and their symbiotic union serves as both extra protection and a life-long mating bond. Fascinating stuff indeed! In this regard the Kwama more closely resemble termites than any other eusocial arthropods we know of. A termite colony requires both a queen and a king to function, with the pair continuing to mate regularly in order to resupply their colony with more workers and soldiers. The Kwama Queen seems to have taken this approach to its most logical and efficient extreme, fusing with her mate for life. Of course all of this is just speculations on my part and the foragers might very well be hermaphrodites that only require the worker's body for protection or even nutrition. We might never know.

The larval stage of the Kwama called a Scrib certainly looks like it doesn't belong to the same species just to keep the overall theme going.

Concept art of a Morrowind Scrib by Michael Kirkbride.

It would seem the only familiar and mundane looking stage of the Kwama is the egg, but at least it makes for one mean omelette.

Unfortunately as was the case with the Gothic remake the later redesigns done to the Kwama resulted in what I can only describe as "by the numbers bug people".

The new Kwama designs introduced through the Elder Scrolls Online.

Yet I can't bring myself to dislike them that much. Although that might have something to do with a certain official artwork than anything more substantial.

Defender, Hive Defender.

And with this we conclude our journey into the fantasy hives of Heretic 2, Gothic and Morrowind. What we witnessed were forms, behaviours and functions fitting the genre of fantasy while at the same time remaining largely rooted in real life arthropod biology. What we can only hope for is that these won't be the only examples of creative and wacky insectile swarms infesting the lands of myths and magic.

Until the next post, I wish you all to read a book and as always stay bugged!