IN> Kyriotates of Animals and Bee Life Cycles

[William Keith]

> On the other hand, I would _tend_ to rule that individual units in a
> swarm counted for purposes of dissonance -- there's got to be something
> to keep Jordi's Hives under control, and a Belialite with a 
> flamethrower
> _should_ be scary even if they've got five zillion wasps. I do not
> underestimate the terror of what a Kyriotate of Jordi can do if it
> has the right Songs. *twitch*

Mrr... it's dirt easy, then, for a Kyrio of Jordi to get dissonance.  
In fact, it makes the attunement unplayable in my opinion, because 
every one of those little critters has HP that would be less than 1 if 
the system were less grainy.  In G4e terms, the swarm is really a 
single entity with Injury Tolerance (Diffuse) [100].

The flip side of this is, I don't think the Songs are as bad as you'd 
fear, either.  The bees all get fangs dripping acid?  Okay, they're 
*really tiny* fangs, dripping a *little* bit of acid, and basically 
they do the normal Numinous Corpus damage on a successful swarm attack. 
  The Kyrio still only has one attack per host swarm, just like any 
other Kyriotate -- he doesn't get Extra Attack 100 [2500].  And if he 
tries to be sneaky and have the swarm split into several attacks... 
which I might allow, as a kind of area attack, which is what a swarm 
attack basically is even on a single target... then the damage is going 
to be spread, too.

Enough damage to damage the functioning of a swarm should count for 
dissonance.  A few random members should not.  I'd further suggest that 
the Kyriotate doesn't *have* control over individual swarm members -- 
if he wants the nice abilities to see diffusely, poof out of the way of 
swats, etc., etc., he's not controlling the actions of individual bees, 
any more than a general writes out an order to every private.  He's 
telling the bee groupmind what to do, and the bees each filter it in 
and each do their part to see that that happens.  He *could* possess a 
single bee, and fly it around looking at stuff, but then he'd be 
responsible for that bee.  Possessing a swarm, you'll see his swarm 
trailing a few bees going off in random directions, looking out for 
stuff, smelling dangerous things, testing wind currents, and generally 
being the swarm's "subconscious."

I mean, what about a Kyriotate of Novalis possessing a swath of lawn, 
as is explicitly allowed?  Do they get dissonance if somebody picks one 
flower or uproots a weed?  How about an algae colony?  The line between 
individual and multicellular organism is pretty blurry... I'd hope the 
Kyrio wouldn't be responsible for every cell of the colony.

My summary is, if you've *got* an attunement that allows possession of 
a conglomerate host, it stands to reason that the Kyriotate's 
dissonance worry is going to be the well-being of the conglomerate 
host.

William