Community

The new block is to be set in/on the Sliver Homeplane, Hive. Previously, all Slivers that we've seen have been orphans, torn from their Homeplane, & the descendants of those orphans. Away from Hive, Slivers are a minority, and can sense, albeit in the most rudimentary of ways, that they are such. As a result, they revert back to an extremely basic form of the hive mind, whereby ALL members are connected. This provides them with protection from other species (NOTE: this phrase is not used in game terms!), much the same way that a single individual is lunch, a plurality is survival.

 

On Hive, however, Slivers are not just the dominant species, they are the ONLY species. Hive is the planar equivalent of Madagascar or The Galapagos, or even Australia. Since the Slivers are, indeed, what make up the plane itself, they've had to branch out into all available niches—& some unavailable ones as well—be they ecological or imaginary (just don't ask who or what is imagining them).

 

Long, long ago, even taking into account the differences in the passage of time between the differing planes, even long before their "first" appearance—or rather, our first introduction to them—in Rath Block, Slivers on Hive had already been in competition with one another for eons. What Slivers have remained as what we would recognize as "A Sliver" have evolved to grant their benefits to only their own hive. This is not to say that there aren't still some Slivers that benefit all, nor does it mean that there aren't some Slivers that could be described as parasitic; they are just in the minority.

One thing to remember, ALL Slivers are symbiotic, once you take into consideration the fact that parasitism actually does come under the aegis of symbiosis. Mutualism/symbiosis, commensalism, [I can't quite remember the technical term right now. It's defined as a relationship in which the parties neither benefit, nor are harmed by their relationship with/to each other.], and parasitism/antibiosis. When I talk about parasitic Slivers, I'm specifically talking about relationships of commensalism or worse (at least, worse for one party). Remember, commensalism is/can be on both/either side of [ ].