"Great fleas have little fleas upon their backs to bite 'em, and little fleas have lesser fleas and so ad infinitum" - Augustus De Morgan (Siphonaptera)

Signature of the insectfolk, bane of those who cross them, a huge beetlefolk with multiple scales of its fellows aboard.

As a group they are well habituated to acting and fighting as a team; most typically consider them a work crew with their crane-truck - they go places; everyone dismounts and climb around the space to do what they need to.

Often this might look incongruous like the huge beetle perched on a wall or ceiling acting as the anchor to a pulley while the medium ones are pulling on a rope - like the largest guy is putting in the least effort - but they know their physics and are happy to do the seemingly impossible slowly.

With a little reconfiguration of the mounting straps, the huge beetle can also get its wings out and the whole lot can fly but it is exhausting for the huge beetle and not used directly into danger if at all possible.

Rare to be found outside of beetlescale vaults in this current age unless shoring up a breach or re-excavating access ways.

What makes these guys particularly dangerous is they all have spider-climb ability to traverse any surface and hang upside down from anything that is not perfectly slick

They trundle into battle while the smaller ones pelt the foe with projectiles until the mediums dismount to fight alongside it while the smalls continue to harass the foe from atop the huge one.

A medium insectfolk can carry along two of the small ones in a similar manner - like having large cats or small child riding your shoulders; transporting is doable, fighting can get tricky.

With mediums and smalls alone, typically the smalls dismount for high surfaces to support while the medium stalls the foe. Well habituated pairs can have a single small fight from their medium - also fighting melee, typically with a lance.

Stats
Huge Beetlefolk - as Ogre, less unpleasant, can in an hour prepare themselves for flight and get a fly speed equal to their normal movement
Medium Insectfolk - as human, bandit stats for workers, thug stats for soldiers
Small Insectfolk - as kobolds, plus natural ability to Haste themselves once daily

Thinking about how to do mirror-dimensions and the like for the 'Holes' bandwagon called by Prismatic Wasteland.

I want this because my players have encountered time-space traversing insectfolk whose hives branch across the boundaries of dimensions. Noone told them they couldn't, so they did.

Partially inspired by recent readings of a recent sci-fi series where the big trope is that the ancient fore-runner type aliens actually broke the rules of physics trying to paint the galaxy red to make it go faster. Physics itself before and after they turned on their machines was different - I love the idea of *actually different fundamental rules* to distinguish different worlds and dimensions.

All this to say that I would like something to make the different worlds my players by tumble into to feel different through some mechanical quirk. Partly inspired by thoughts I had prior to 5.5e dropping where the new DMG could present menus of optional rules but suggest certain combinations to achieve certain flavours - grimdark, sword and sorcery, high fantasy, etc.

Environmental Examples are how most examples of this work but for mirror universes, why not make a tweak that is the application of a house rule that is not usually in play? I used something like this to capture the 'mythic, realm of heroes' atmosphere for the Plateau of Jor where the giants live in my home campaign - rules like Spellburn, luck points and the big d30 coming into play only on the plateau.

Taking on the three mirror world examples from my previous thoughts on where the Vaults of the Insectfolk could lead:
18. Alternate - mirror world, bleak - the same type of room you just left but with evidence of resource shortage
19. Alternate - mirror world, wasteland - the same type of room you just left but with evidence of harsh-environment adaptation
20. Alternate - mirror world, dark - the same type of room you just left but evidence of heightened danger and cruelty

One could suggest that on rolling up one of the above you pick or roll a rule from the sub-table below and that remains in effect until people work their way home.

Bleak world - resources are scarce, things break and you must do without
1. Hit points are not restored by rest, only consumption of rations (d6 per meal)
2. Shields splintered / mail rent / helms sundered - sacrifice the gear to persist.
3. You don’t kill NPCs/monsters, you defeat them as per Spiceomancy.
4. Critical failures - things break on Naturals ones; tools weapons

Wasteland - environment is harsh, grit is crucial
1. Morale checks for hirelings - before combat, before traps, under any hardship.
2. "unquenchable spirit" - modified Stun, take d3 ability damage to shake off a stun effect
3. Big d30 - once per session swap a d20 you roll for a d30
4. Modify overload encounter die - no fatigue or exhaustion effects anymore - replaced with straight HP damage. Everyone and everything keeps going until they drop.

Dark world - general supernatural hazard
1. Cascading Damage Dice - dice explodes on a maximum roll
2. Critical hits by monsters - max damage plus an extra dice
3. Mutations from spellcasting - such as these d500 by Coins and Scrolls
4. Retention check for spells - magic is reliable anymore, roll over the spell level every time you cast or the spell goes way. You can learn it again as new.

If you continued to wander deeper you could end up two realities out into the wasteland and one into a bleaker direction with Big d30, hireling morale checks and critical failure rules all in operation.

For a truly fun 'Sliders' style twist you could just have proper mirror universes with almost everything being similar such that the players could re-emerge from the vaule and pick up all their quests, NPCs and holdings exactly as they left them... except only the fact that the 'cascading damage rule' remains in effect indicates that they are not in fact at home but the universe next door.

GM achievement award if you can gloss that one over until the players come to that realisation on their own.

Other house rule collections one could tap to build 'flavour sets' are: Methods & Madness, The Gibbering Blog, Eldritch Fields, Hobgoblinry.

This is my reworking my approach to dungeons and labyrinths - for fixed rooms with uncertain contents. This is an evolution of the approach I previously used which was more searching for things within a labyrinth; moving towards a depth-crawl.

Beetlescale Labyrinths

Great labyrinths of the insectfolk - not quite the trouser-legs of time as Pratchett or a full blown randomised depthcrawl as Library of Ynn but something similar.

The maps remain similar, fractal. You enter them in a non-euclidean manner as per Goblinpunch Non-Euclidean Geography - clockwise round the ring corridor - take a certain direction and you are in a different place and time.

The insect folk are embarking on the long march until all the rest of the sentients stop their nonsense and they can reemerge.

An approach could be adding another option - not just deeper but sideways - sideways explores the relatively euclidean time-space slice one is currently present in - deeper chooses to continue into the non-euclidean depths, venturing to new time-space points further from where the start point was.

Every room is a honey comb cell - a long hexagonally sided room with a door in each wall and each end.
Each door in a wall opens into another similar room.
Each door at the ends leads into a tunnel and then to another similar room.

A brief background to insectfolk elementalism, d12 typical elementalists and a 'Conclave encounter' for the emergency 'Conclave' bandwagon called by Prismatic Wasteland.

What do you get when your culture pre-dates the gods, souls and the outer planes at large.

Why are there no insectfolk wandering around in the heavens? Because insectfolk do not have souls - not in the mammalian sense of them falling out and drifting away when their body dies. Insectfolk are far supperior to that. The soulstuff of insect folk gets caught in their carapaces and stays on the prime material, typically leaching away into the ethereal and then collecting back to the great hives.

Half the point of the great hives of the insect folk - and all of their great structure building in general - is to provide waystations for these last remains of the dead, to guide them back into the hatching chambers to be reborn anew.

In the ages of the insectfolk, the times before even the illithids, times the aboleth dimly recall, there was no worship of gods as would be recognised today - all that came later. Animist practices were frequently found but mostly insectfolk who pried behind the metaphysical curtains found the elemental planes. The astral was a barren place then; no outer planes had formed as no soulstuff had collected to form them.

The purity of the elements were looked to by insects in a manner somewhat like worship - shrines were raised, omens consulted and abiding in harmony with the elements was held as a goal by many. What exactly it meant to be 'in harmony' was the subject of much debate and conflict. Lines of schism included whether to focus on the manifestation of elements as inner strength or to look to draw power from the elements in the environment. Nothing was ever resolved.

Law and Chaos shaped the cosmos; primal forces of order and entropy churning the elements - manifestations of these forces from the elemental planes became the first great primordials accorded worship and respect by the insects. Law was held most in esteem, for the structures of the insectfolk both social and material sat well with Law. The place for Chaos and entropy was seen but feared and fought against.

Over time elementalism, insect-style developed a broad panoply of wise ancestral insects, saints and teachers, heroes of great battles, disasters and ventures. Worship included all these many intercessors more often than it appealed directly to the elements themselves.

Inspired by images of little ants riding on big ants and tarantulas keeping tiny frogs, what does it look like when you get creatures operating on such different scales, they can climb on top of one another (and have sufficiently relaxed concepts of personal space as to be happy to do this)?

Conceptually, think about keeping racoons and the racoons having pets themselves, everyone carving out their own niche. The biggest creatures live in the spaces, the mid size creatures can share those spaces, around the edges, under the tables, up on the shelves and so on - and the smallest creatures can live in the walls and ceilings, maybe interacting with the mid-size creatures but being careful around the largest creatures who could hurt them without noticing

So - cultural aspects of the insectfolk:
- Things and space are fleeting, give generously
- Know one another by their deeds, accept all who join the great work
- Work hard to be lazy