Understanding Bug Civilization

First and foremost, there’s one thing to understand about bug civilization: the borders you see on the map are not really borders, per se, and what you see are regional blocs and alliance groups more than they are actually individual nations, and they have several polities within them – the Scholars’ Redoubt, for example, has multiple ant countries, nomadic fly and mosquito groups, spider countries etc. They coexist in the way that they do because bug-people don’t really use land in the same way humans do. Instead, bug countries will claim houses as theirs, and they will tend to exclusively use resources in the regions they live in, but large-scale amounts of land belonging directly to a country or even person is rare.

Accordingly, what the borders on the map mostly represent is more bounds of collective resource usage than enforced borders in the modern human sense – the borders of each region are drawn primarily around the houses controlled by each regional bloc, such as the Scholar’s Redoubt. The resources inside each set of borders are nearly exclusively used by the members of that region, when they can defend them, and the house-cities are distinctly controlled by bug countries, but the people from each region can often be found wandering into other regions. Bugs simply mostly don’t have a concept of “this person should only be on this area of land”, with only a couple of exceptions.

Just how organized and cooperative a region is depends on the region. For example, the Scholars’ Redoubt has a highly formal system of cooperation, with a council consisting of the militaries of each bug group, and a civilian scholarly center with contributors from all around the region, these two institutions making up major elements of regional cooperation. On the other hand, the Marauders’ Agreement next door has no real sort of governing bodies, merely a pact not to raid each other for the largest part. Technological level is also not standardized or even very consistent between bug peoples. The Scholars’ Redoubt has complex construction, magical prowess, and some degree of mechanical engineering, but lacks agriculture and ironworking, for example, and every bug civilization lacks reading and writing. The spread and reach of these institutions and technologies has been a vital piece of bug history.

Also, as a cultural note: bugs don’t really have a historical wellspring of names to choose from, so naming is extremely literal among bugs, usually named for notable features or skills or habits. A bug-person might be named something like Red, if they have red hair, or Scavenger Quick, or Gold-Eyes, or Twitches. This also means that bug-peoples’ names can change multiple times during their life, as one feature or another becomes more notable. Also, bug-people of social and eusocial bug types (such as ants or bees or wasps) often keep ranks in their names, so a particularly cheerful black ant soldier might be named Guardsman Smiles or something.