Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

You know, the alien races that the BSE liberates, re-educates, and sets on the grueling path towards total Bragulization (or at least as close to Bragularity as it gets for inferior non-Space Bears)? Those are the unlucky ones. Those are the ones the Imperator found unworthy to participate in the glory of Dialectical Warfare with the greatest ideology the universe has ever seen.

The bio-borg and any number of other species of the BSE periphery who get every impression that they're fighting for their very survival? Despite the misfortune of not being born Bragulan, they are nevertheless privileged to be allowed to contribute to the perfection of Byzonism, to be part of the eternal march of Bragule's triumph across the stars. As for the carefully adjusted intensity of such warfare, well, the threat of total extinction does bring out a species' genius wonderfully.

So, the Bragulan theater commander responsible for the this particular war? Literally a theater commander. He's shifting the backdrops. He's managing the ratio of victories and defeats. He's sending coded messages hidden in other coded messages to his commissars, making sure where everything is where it should be on the tactical level, even if it means accidentally withholding supplies or summarily executing overly valiant officers for ideological deviance. At one ear he's got a geek from the scientific development beareaus demanding those traces of enemy tech he'd been promised would materialize at the next push, according to their own psycho-historical calculations. At his other ear there's the apparatachik from the propaganda ministries, passing down directives that the Proletariat is in the mood for an inspiring defeat and he wants his film crews to catch at least three million casualties in the next week, never mind that was going to throw off his entire operational tempo. And somewhere out there is the IGBV liaison he needs to track down so he can get his spooks to stick their necks out a bit more, because maybe he did over-report his progress a bit to show up his rival in the theater over.

And meanwhile, he realizes that he had run out of appropriately low-tech conscripts and no way could he force his crack troops to do a remotely convincing defeat without sacrificing a boatload of them alongside a good chunk of his perfectly competent officer cadre which he'll have to purge on entirely spurious grounds. It was going to be a bad day.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Ford Prefect »

I thought we had discussed something like this earlier in the thread but apparently not. I really like this regulated aspect of Bragulan wars as part of a wider system of control (S3 plan genes memes etc etc). Sometimes winning is beneficial, sometimes losing. Sometimes they win when the lose and lose when they win. The Bragulan Star empire exists for the purpose of increasing Byzonism throughout the universe, but that is best done in strange and carefully measured ways. A layer of dysfunction.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

Why, you yourself sparked the idea in this post. :P
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

So after the Parapsychic Cataclysm or whatever we call this, you've got the human nations all fracturing and descending into all sorts of social trends and whatnot, the Space Americas, Space Monarchies, you've got the Federation-esque Foundation-like (Simon Jester Umeria expy) scientist state called the MERIDIAN INSTITUTE or something, and you also have the emergence of the patriarchial authoritarian God-Emperor psychic dictator overlord figure and the matriarchial hedonistic liberal Empress (Langley's Haruhi based) psychic leader lady mistress figure - both of whom rule over their respective entities.

I am thinking that instead of difficult attempts to shoehorn Fin's IoM and Langley's Holy Empire into this context, we can go with this route:

After the Parapsychic Cataclysm I think the reactionary remnant survivalist states would possibly freak out at all the espersand psykers and have progroms or gnarly projects to suppress or harness or control the misunderstood folks, and this would cause all sorts of diasporas and exoduses of persecuted minorities.

Enter the God-Emperor figure who creates a safe haven for the maligned and castigated sufferers. But he is not entirely a benevolent figure, he has off the walls psychic powers, desires more powers which he harnesses from his newfound followers in great Psychic Choirs, and he pursues his agenda of psyker supremacy with his disciples. We end up with a Brotherhood of Mutants, Magneto, Sith, Imperial Cult kind of deal as he carves out a space for himself by mind-controlling warlords and whatnot... but he can only go so far until the advent of counter-psionics and all that.

The present state is that there is no IoM expy, but rather we have this cluster of worlds utterly dominated by this Cult and their all-powerful leader and their followers, and around these Cult Worlds, we have a whole mess of warring states with dictators and strongmen and authoritarian assholes currying favor from the psychic cult and their Sith-like agents. It's a sort of religious movement thing too. And terror-organizations. With a bit of The Mule from Foundation thrown in.


The Empress and the Holy Empire expy will be a less grimdark and less fucked up version of this, possibly pseudo-nomadic, psychic magic girls (and guys) all perky and helping out friendly states - the Space Americas, the Shinrans, the Space Monarchies and the like. All happy fare and whatnot.

So yeah, less monolithic monostate monoculture things and more Jedi vs. State transnational non-state actor things going on.

Jesus Christ my computer died and I thought this TLDR thing got erased but after rebooting, firefox apparently saved the whole session! Holy shit!
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

The God Emperor Dark Lord figure's throne is actually an enormous hyperspace-capable skeletal Crystacean (now known as CRYST) carcass that resonates and amplifies his already prodigious parapsychic powers. He and his cohorts actually discovered a graveyard of fallen Crysts and since the Samtics, I presume, lack psychic manifestations and psionic knowhow, they had no idea that the corpses they left in space could actually be engineered into deadly mentallic weapons platforms.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Siege »

Are the Emperor's followers also psychics themselves, or are they just mindfucked legions of soulless thralls whose very sense of self has been warped by His Divine Telepathic Mojo? Or perhaps the Emperor can stick shards of his great carcass-throne into the foreheads of some of his hapless followers, thereby sticking a fragment of His divine being into their heads so he can control his legions by proxy. Like copy-pasting his sense of self through soulstone-horcrux-antennas.

Perhaps the two psychic eternalnesses can be further distinguished by the Emperor just outright snacking on any psychics he comes across, whereas the Empress does loving nurturing (in turn smothering her followers' sense of self through the sheer pressure of her psychic aura, or something, like a Freudian male-female commentary looping back to Vic's earlier points).
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

Siege wrote:Are the Emperor's followers also psychics themselves, or are they just mindfucked legions of soulless thralls whose very sense of self has been warped by His Divine Telepathic Mojo? Or perhaps the Emperor can stick shards of his great carcass-throne into the foreheads of some of his hapless followers, thereby sticking a fragment of His divine being into their heads so he can control his legions by proxy. Like copy-pasting his sense of self through soulstone-horcrux-antennas.
Both! Though I think the more senior of the SITH EMPRAH's agents would tend to be powerful psychics in their own right, if they are to serve as puppeteers behind the throne / sinister cult leaders and society-manipulators in their own right. As Shroom mentioned, most developed polities have effective counter-psyker measures in place (these guys certainly wouldn't have a chance at the heart of the USS or the BSE), so overt psychic domination would either happen out in the fringe world spacemericas, or be a sign of that society's thorough alignment with the EMPRAH.

(And so when the CEID agent inevitably rolls into town with her massive technological superiority and confronts the enemy spymaster, the latter gets to make it a memorable fight with rockin' sith powers.)

But I think physically implanting chunks of carcass-throne into loyal followers might be a bit too much. Cryst warshards are actually fairly rare things, and attuning to them to use as power amplifiers can have dire side effects. For one, the losers of the Cryst-Samtic War are still out there, and they have become a fairly integrated part of the Karlack ecosystem...
Siege wrote:Perhaps the two psychic eternalnesses can be further distinguished by the Emperor just outright snacking on any psychics he comes across, whereas the Empress does loving nurturing (in turn smothering her followers' sense of self through the sheer pressure of her psychic aura, or something, like a Freudian male-female commentary looping back to Vic's earlier points).
I don't claim to know where Shroom wants to go with that particular faction, but he was pretty adamant over them being just relatively benevolent magical girls who show up in places to help. I'm not sure how Teen Empress fits into that scheme so far, but what we have so far is rather more interesting than rival mirror psiocracies going at it somewhere in the setting's periphery.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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I am thinking that like 40k you've got a bunch of useless psykers sacrificed to keep the leader sustained, while the workable psykers get training. The really powerful ones can be his lieutenants and agents, as Vic says. They can connive and backstab each other to ascend the cult's ranks, with the hope of one day becoming the leader themselves, but when that fateful day comes, the leader still ends up eating the most ambitious apprentice (in secret!), fulfilling their wishes by becoming "one" with the leader.

I am cool with them having CRYST fragments around distributed to the most promising psyker agents and viziers as SACRED ARTEFACTS of power.

I am thinking these guys won't be that close to USS/Brag/Karlack/Wild Space. So the threat of being eaten by psychic-smelling cryst-sniffing bugs is minimal. Unless one of these Sithoid idiots fucks around in Wild Space or something, and then uh-oh.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

From one perspective, all that expanse of space monarchies and space republics and other retro space polities formed in the aftermath of the psychic cataclysm are crystallized remnants that never managed to pull themselves back together, and that the heart of parahumanity's old civilization is basically irrelevant while all the happening is out at the edges of historic human expansion, where the USS grapple with vast and deadly alien threats.

From another perspective who cares about how one hybridized hyper-accelerated civ at the edges is doing, and the psychic Sith cults and magical girl institutes are fighting to reclaim the soul of mankind...
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Lelouch vi Britannia »

Siege wrote:Perhaps the two psychic eternalnesses can be further distinguished by the Emperor just outright snacking on any psychics he comes across, whereas the Empress does loving nurturing (in turn smothering her followers' sense of self through the sheer pressure of her psychic aura, or something, like a Freudian male-female commentary looping back to Vic's earlier points).
If you smother too much, you end up with something along the lines of the Multiversal Empire of Happiness from SDNW4, a herd of indolent and codependent cattle who devote every fiber of their bloated being to attending to the petty whims of a narcissistic god-child.

Going with the angle of the new Holy Empire sending out teams of magical girls and other specialists to intervene on worlds where help is needed, this new Empire of Happiness could have been the result of such an intervention that went horribly wrong. The team leader went native, set herself up as despot, and purged those who didn't transfer their loyalty to her.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Vic is favoring the idea that the empress godhead magic girl numero uno lady herself has transubstantiated out of the physical world or is otherwise unseen, with influences felt elsewise.

I'm going with the notion of multiple sects and branches of the Magic Girls. One of them will be all full of celebrity psykers and sueprstars and whatnot and focused on decadence and hedonism and having a great time and materialism and consumerism and super diabetic warm fuzzy feelings to the wazoo - like Planet Supergrass in REDLINE.

That is the mainstream Magic Girl sect that really did suffer from parapsychic feedback from the hedonistic populaces, who are kind of themselves lost in the insanity and fun-filledness of it all. They also moonlight as superheroes and whatnot. Saving the day and stuff.

The less mainstream, more SRS BSNSS and purer Magic Girl sect is the diametric opposite of the 40kImperial/Brotherhood of Mutant/Sith Magnetopatines. Those bad guys all fetishize power and control, the control of worlds and peoples and FATE ITSELF, whereas this group of Magic Girls' transcendent ideology is that of Choice.

(I was influenced by Mieville's garudas in Perdido Street Station)

Choice. Not just the free will of sentients, but the implications of that. The infinite choices lead to infinite possibilities, and for prescients, this is the whole "the future is an ever branching path of forking roads" and such. Unpredictable, wild, with endless potential.

This is anathema to the sith dudes because they're control freaks and their idea of transubstantiating humanity is through iron-fisted dominion and will power.

Whereas these Magic Girls subscribe to the notion that through choice and freeness, the infinite potential possibilities and beautiful chaos of it all will be what saves humanity. Diversity and such.

The Hedonist Magic Girls also subscribe to this, but their Choice of choice is getting high and partying all the time and stuff so.... nyah! :P

The SRS BSNSS Magic Girls are more occult and srs bsnss and are focused on watching and preserving the "threads of fate" and the flow of such.

So yeah.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

Indeed, my ideas looks more like Madokaism than Haruhiism. (Says the one with the Homura-tar)

Before the psychic cataclysm created by psyker experimentation broke everything, the patchwork of anachronistic and relatively static polities known to outsiders as the Fracture used to be the heart of human galactic civilization. The reason polities in the Fracture distrust psychics and cling to strange and conservative cultures and social systems is because the cataclysm tore a new one in the collective psychic unconscious of humanity itself - one can say than the humanity's psyche has become...fractured. 8-) Only the parahuman civilizations at what used to be the backwaters of human space (like the USS) was spared the psychic trauma and its aftermath. (although lots of other factors also play into the dynamism of the USS)

EMPRAH MAGNETOPATINE took persecuted psykers and founded a secure homeland for them, but that transformed over time into a network of client warlord states, insidious cults and secret associations all aimed to seize influence over the wider expanse of the Fracture. In comparison, the Empress was never really visible - just a numinous source of inspiration that keeps touching young psyker minds and turning them into magical girls. While the magical girls did associate and form institutions over time, and many did indeed attain positions of supreme influence over polities and societies, they never really coalesced into a single polity. Having a symbolic godhead who only ever appears to drop a hint or vision or two has that effect.

In any case, the overall agenda of the Magi is to heal humanity's fractured psyche to allow it to finally move on from the Cataclysm. As you can imagine, various Magi disagree on how to do this. I imagine that the majority approach it much like Shroom does: recognizing that they can reach no definite agreement over their methods, each Magi would stick to tending their host societies and encourage their healthy development, while preserving their overall diversity so they can all find their own way forward. Others may have a less tolerant approach and aggressively promote and syncretize cultural traits they find desirable, using more overt means of influence. Others quest into the human subconsciousness to locate the Empress. Yet others go full hedonism as mentioned out of insanity or despair.

And because these are still magical girls, occasionally fragments of mass unconscious collide and boil over where conflict or turmoil occurs in the polities of the Fracture and actual monsters from the Id manifest. And then the Magi punch them in the face with lasers.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Idea:

The Fracture began and culminated in a Horus Heresy-esque super battle. The balkanizing space atrocity fleets the authoritarian earth empire armadas, the subjugated subverted psion-controlled forces... and then someone brings out a gigantic fossilized cryst weaponized scalar array.

A multi-kilometer sprawling skeleton, pseudoarachnid limbs of glass expanding outward, reaching into the void, segments branching like branches. A crystal hand glowing ominously with shifting cosmic energies. It could even maybe possible emerge out of the turbulent oceanic atmosphere of Jupiter or some other gas giant, like that Germanian superweapon in Old Familiars. :D

Space lasers, missile swarms, music chantings. I am not sure what the array is, a reality-warping psychic choir or a mind-killing anti-psyker wave thing, maybe even an attempt to induce Instrumentality to transmogrify humanity into an ascended form. Who knows.

It goes to shit, and then because of the emanations of the crystalline chandelier superweapon (which gradually expanded into world-tree proportions), what happens next is SUDDENLY KARLACKS!

Crystalacks descend upon it all, and the weapon is fired.

Time stops. Five hundred years after, no one still knows what happened. A whole cluster of star systems, the Empire's core, the very center of its dominion - the region tasked with the control of all aspects of the regime - just vanished. Leaving the outlying worlds free to crumble. Unshackled by the cognomemetics.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Shroom Man 777 wrote:It could even maybe possible emerge out of the turbulent oceanic atmosphere of Jupiter or some other gas giant, like that Germanian superweapon in Old Familiars. :D
I've completely forgotten what that was.

Yup. Feral nations, bereft of the guiding hand of the Old Empire that kept them whole and functioning, eventually settling into stable states at the cost of the ability to move forward.

But still, relics of the Earth Empire abound the expanse. Other superweapons, relic populations of resource megafauna, strategic reserves of psychic abomination-soldiers...a lot of Fracture nations still make use of these things, perhaps to their detriment.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Somewhere connecting the "northern" reaches of Wild Space and the USS to the Fracture and other regions (Myrran, Kheler, etc.) would be this expanse of space where the Trucial Stars hold sway. Their worlds are akin to oases in these barren interstellar expanses and the names of their worlds - since I was reading on oases and North African oases and such - would be the likes of Azraq, Ghadames, Tozeur, Remada, Tieret, Dehiba and Lahmar.

Cienega would be some Space Spain world, Cyrenaic would be something else.

Also I decided that deliberately making bland boring space nations as a rib at those guys at TEO would be a really shit way of setting out worldbuilding so I decided to make these Space America-esque nations awesome instead. Thanks Vic!

Our version of Shinra would be the Shen Rhapsody. A bunch of squatter colonists inhabit these paleoworlds of the Old Earth Empire and when a group of Meridian Institute scienticians (who later on went native when the temptation to be non-impartial powerful captains of industry proved too much) came by they discovered that the place was teeming with Old Earth Empire archeotechnology, specifically power generating ones.

Dig this. The Shen Rhapsody worlds themselves, constellations of moons and worlds and planetoids sporting numerous monoliths (the smaller ones as huge as mountain ranges, the larger ones like continents) marked with xenoglyphics. When the Meridian people went inside these superstructures, they discovered well-preserved cadavers of giant spacemen - headless, faceless, brainless ones. Later on, they figured out that sending energy into these well-preserved cadavers partially reanimated them, enabling their digestive systems to function. By feeding these mindless giants they could actually generate exotic cosmic energies far exceeding what was put in! The xenoglyph markings on these tombs were actually epitaphs, not rhapsody poems as the space gypsy squatters once supposed!


Vic and I fleshed out some details of the Fracture and the Old Earth Empire that preceded it. The Old Earth Empire was like a hegemony that encroached outwards to subjugate the far flung colonies from generation ships and cryo-arks and whatnot that had been launched centuries ago.

One of their methods of subjugation which made then absorb nearly all of humanity (perhaps except of those exceptionally far flung ones, some of which became the USS) was the use of first generation psykers, non-Apexai Hybrid ones, naturally evolved ones who the Empire mutated. Their mutations involved rendering them sub-sentient and enlarging their cortexes and their psi-potentials and their bodies, turning them into gigantic mindless slugs - oversized astropaths and Dune Guild Navigators. They would be interfaced with machines for astral communications, the fine-tuning of interstellar drives, and as cyborg supercomputers, etc.

Aside from knocking off Dune and 40k obviously, the point of using these giant psykers would be so that their communications grid would be subtly infused with hypnotics and memetics and other forms of mentallic control. The Old Earth Empire could have satellites with these gigantic slugmen orbiting enslaved worlds, beaming mentallics on entire populations.

This is not direct mind control, but subtler conditionings, whispers to make the people compliant and malleable.

Anyway, the control was broken when a.) the next generation of psykers evolved - psykers who could perhaps match the giant slugmen without sporting grotesque mutations. And B.) when the Samtics subtly interfered by providing a few of the nearest human colonists with psi-block tech. Not really fancy psi-nullifiers or anti-psi weapons. Just things to keep their brains locked from pervasive influences.

These would gradually lead to the breakdown of the Old Earth Empire, and the pervasive use of giant slugmen psykers and nascent messianic free independent rebel psykers, and also of people with FREEMINDS and FREETHOUGHT, would cause the FRACTURE.


Centuries later we have the rise of the Grandeur of Auriga (space monarchy), the Shen Rhapsody, the impartial and small but influential scienticians of the Meridian Institute, the transnational psychic orders of the MINISTRY OF FATE (authoritarian Sith guys), the loose groups of benevolent Magi (magic girls), the Coalition of the Freeworld Cascade (or something, Space Merica), and the imperialistic hegemonistic expansionists of...

I am confused whether to call it the STERNREICH and have a bunch of grinning madmen and terribly mashed grammatically incorrect German.

Or, as Vic suggested, NEUROM. (neu-rome) With their grins.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Lelouch vi Britannia »

Oh yes, I definitely dig the Shen Rhapsody. Hell, it sounds more like Final Fantasy than anything RogueIce actually gave us back in the day.

Some ideas I have regarding the Shen Rhapsody: There's an honest-to-Haruhi Shinra Electric Power Company (name very much subject to change) that controls the majority of the monoliths, performing research on their functions while providing power to the masses that dwell within the Shen Rhapsody. Manipulations by the Ministry of Fate's agents within the company led to the formation of a Jenova Project analogue utilizing the cadavers stored in the monoliths, with all that entails; cue Sephiroth and his kin as corporate warlords used to enforce order on worlds under Shinra influence. The rest of the monoliths are controlled by various independent organizations: Technologists from the Trucial Stars tasked by a Magi group with recovering other items of Old Earth Empire technology, ambitious Sternreich/Neurom colonists with their eyes set on the entirety of the Shen Rhapsody, a violently isolationist sect of Shen natives that seeks to purge all foreign influences from the Rhapsody, et cetera, et cetera.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Siege »

I like "NEUROM" because while the inhabitants could be all "THE GLORY OF ROME" and such, the reality of it could be that it's just an abbreviation of "neuromancer", an archaic Imperial term for a particular stage of slugman mutoidification. So these imperial fuckwits have actually named themselves after a particularly gruesome TRUE FORM perversity.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Lelouch vi Britannia »

Siege wrote:I like "NEUROM" because while the inhabitants could be all "THE GLORY OF ROME" and such, the reality of it could be that it's just an abbreviation of "neuromancer", an archaic Imperial term for a particular stage of slugman mutoidification. So these imperial fuckwits have actually named themselves after a particularly gruesome TRUE FORM perversity.
In that case, how common are psykers within Neurom, and do they have any actual neuromancers among them? Would neuromancers even exist in significant quantities at this point in time?

I still think we should still have the Sternreich alongside Neurom. Why go for one or the other when you can accomodate both? I'm thinking that the Sternreich are a fraction of the size of Neurom, but have exponentially larger egos. Hell, they might even be a breakaway state from Neurom.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

I'm quite tickled by the possibility that the founders of the greatest and most fearsome empire that the Fracture has ever known read its name off an old Imperial bunker door or something.

But no, NEUROM in its current envisionment is actually highly pragmatic and aggressively amemetic. It measures its power solely by the gigatons, and deals with all the lingering unconscious psychic trauma memetic failure-state stuff by treating it as though it doesn't exist - it is the very exemplar of the Bismarckian realpolitik paleoretro great power in spaaaace.

But you can't really claim the mantle of the Old Empire without wrapping yourself in memetic-psychic potential, and the willful blindness that served them so well during their rise has left them open to loads of Ministry influence. The two are basically inextricable at this point, and Shroom speculates that if the very name of the Ministry of Fate might have originated from a NEUROM secret police or government agency.

As for psykers? I expect so. As for neuromancers in particular? Well, my quick answer is that NEUROM social control is like the Old Empire's minus the subtlety (which is saying something), so whatever it does use is not the best for the task.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Lelouch vi Britannia wrote: Some ideas I have regarding the Shen Rhapsody: There's an honest-to-Haruhi Shinra Electric Power Company (name very much subject to change) that controls the majority of the monoliths, performing research on their functions while providing power to the masses that dwell within the Shen Rhapsody.
The Shen-Rhap Orgone Accumulation Conglomerate. Orgone being the energy excreted by the monolith-tombs. The tomb worlds! :mrgreen:

These will be the Meridian Institute colonists who were corrupted by greed to become de facto rulers of the societies they're supposed to help.

Maybe the tendency of Meridian colonists to end up being techno-oligarchs (elsewhere we also get the AdMech/Technopriest kind of Technotheocrats) is why the modern day Meridian Institute attempts to be neutral and such.
Manipulations by the Ministry of Fate's agents within the company led to the formation of a Jenova Project analogue utilizing the cadavers stored in the monoliths, with all that entails; cue Sephiroth and his kin as corporate warlords used to enforce order on worlds under Shinra influence. The rest of the monoliths are controlled by various independent organizations: Technologists from the Trucial Stars tasked by a Magi group with recovering other items of Old Earth Empire technology, ambitious Sternreich/Neurom colonists with their eyes set on the entirety of the Shen Rhapsody, a violently isolationist sect of Shen natives that seeks to purge all foreign influences from the Rhapsody, et cetera, et cetera.
You've read Vic's mind (! which is no mean feat) when he told me earlier of similar ideas, but then again we're trying to go FF with this in all its bizarrities! Yes. The pseudo-libertarian nature of ShenRhap enables all sorts of deranged actors to play out their plans in the place. Sort of like how all those Cold War spy stories mostly took place in Europe.


I am thinking, and mentioned to Vic, the possibility of NEUROM being a future day Warsaw Pact kind of deal between Sternreich and all sorts of other megalomaniac imperialist nations that officially are merely aligned, but in truth their leaders are controlled and cooperative with a secret cabal of Ministry of Fate overlords. The secret police security apparatus has actually (and originally did mean to) transcend the secular governments, to rule from the shadows, like the Praetorian Guard and the Janissaries.

Maybe the Ministry of Fate began as a bunch of Brotherhood of Mutants God Emperor Magnetopatine kind of deal making their mutant utopia before being subjugated and turned to secret police by the encroaching Sternreich. But then, whoops, God Emperor Magnetopatine went all KANE LIVES and actually turned the Sternreich to a vessel to further his ambitions. Hence when they get their puppet Sternreich and other puppet imperialists to unite, the overlords christened it with the name NEUROM knowing fully well it represented a parapsychic blasphority (perhaps the Old Earth Final Psychic Weapon was called the NEUROM as well!). Whereas the commoners and the secular leaders think its some "Glory of something" deal as Siege suggested.

"NEUROM" as a name of the blasphority would pretty much make the name akin to "Hydra" or "Gargoyle" or some other monster thing.

:mrgreen:
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Did I mention we can also have Nova Meropia? Meropia is an ancient Greek philosopher person's parody of the earlier ancient Greek idea of Atlantis, and is described as a lost continent being HUGER and GREATER than Atlantis itself. Obviously this place will be... another Meridian Institute cockup, except resulting in a few planets full of pretentious posthumans tinkering with ridiculous technologies and being overall a bunch of oddities and cosmic curiosities who are mostly harmless. Sure, they can sell their ridiculous tech to other folks with mixed results. ;)
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Lelouch vi Britannia »

Shroom Man 777 wrote:Did I mention we can also have Nova Meropia? Meropia is an ancient Greek philosopher person's parody of the earlier ancient Greek idea of Atlantis, and is described as a lost continent being HUGER and GREATER than Atlantis itself. Obviously this place will be... another Meridian Institute cockup, except resulting in a few planets full of pretentious posthumans tinkering with ridiculous technologies and being overall a bunch of oddities and cosmic curiosities who are mostly harmless. Sure, they can sell their ridiculous tech to other folks with mixed results. ;)
Meropia is also a medical term that means "partial blindness," from what a quick Google search tells me. They may be ultimately harmless in the grand scheme of things, and their hearts may well be in the right place, but they can't see shit. I'm guessing product recalls are a major thing when it comes to Meropian tech. On the flip side, there are probably enterprising Magi and Ministry of Fate cells (as well as other parties) that have figured out truly unconventional ways to use Meropian tech, ways that the Meropians could not have possibly foreseen.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Maybe the Meropians deliberately use their export buyers as field tests. Or they've degenerated into some kind of skewered posthuman experiment deviating in really odd ways due to sheer isolation and not-caringness.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Isopterids, the termite race!

I was mulling on whether to post this here or in the Collab Universe thread, but since I'm too lazy to rewrite this into a proper article-like post, and since I'm just copy-pasting this stream of consciousness infodump which I sent to Vic via FB, I'm just posting it here since it's not polished.

Anyway, I wanted some weirdo culture that's communal and thus reflecting sci-fi stereotype space insect colony civlizations but in an interesting way, not the bog standard tropes or at least with interesting twists on 'em, yet I know doing communal Confucian conformity civilizations is too easy to fuck up. AND we already have the Khelerene, the strange bird folks from the TALON WORLDS (who have to contend with the Myranni, in a cat and canary situation) with their nests and their ancestor-worship consciousness-uploaded agglomerated super-mind AI constructs forming the core of their society and their metaspirituality. (Yes, their pseudoleaders are a consensus of uploaded blended minds of their deceased revered ancestors coalesced into super AIs)

So the Isopterids had to be different, and so their colonial insect nature has to be due to the necessities of space travel and space colonization. Okay, they fly around in termite colony ships, but that's just the tip of the iceberg. They are communal because in their first stage of world-colonization, in their most basic society, each intrepid Isopterid is a living Von Neuman machine containing the blueprints of a whole civilization - like how Queen and King termites are the building blocks of colonies.

Stage 1 Isopterids contain within their enlarged forms the building blocks of a whole society. With a dozen Isopterid on a planet, you have the potential to create a whole civilization. Their whole bodies can metamorphose to suit terraformation, with modular specialized biotechnorgans, their DNA contains the essences for a whole viable population complete with nano-encoded GENETIC MEMORY - not quite Khelerene-levels of ancestor-mind-upload data, but the memetic information is encoded on a cellular level so the basics of the vanilla Isopterid culture and society is preserved and spread.

Its like if a NASA astronaut had terraformation gear AND wikipedia/google built into his suit, except that his suit is also blended with his body. Or if a NASA astronaut's terraformation machinery was capable of movement and was, for convenience's sake, equipped with sentient AI and thus considered a full person. The Stage 1 Isopterids are akin to SCVs, Zerg Drones and Protoss Probes in a way, except they are fully sentient and aware of the gravity of their responsibilities.

Stage 2 and Stage 3 Isopterids are the descendants who are members of more stable established colonies and have more choices in life. Their modular technorganic nature means that they can still serve as potential Von Neuman devices in case of calamities, so refugee Isopterids are equipped to rebuild their societies, but in a stable society, they don't need to be fully equipped.

So they fulfill specialized roles. Scientist Isopterids with uber-enhanced sensory arrays scan nature and grow curious, soldier Isopterids with decked out combat mods defend civilization and grow bold, contemplative Isopterids with communications monitoring and info-processing brainiac systems become philosophical and get attuned to the galactic zeitgeist, logistics-specialized Isopterids become all frugal with their resource-use, etc.

They are not mandated into caste systems by an oppressive society, not yet at least. But as the colonies and societies are established, informal "castes" may be formed as the next generation picks up where their forebears left off. If they choose to follow their ancestors in their specialized and established fields and honor these newly formed traditions. Or they can always branch off into new pursuits if they want to, but they would not have the ingrained genetic memories of their immediate ancestors with already-accrued EXP points.

Isopterids are equiped for individual reproduction. But Isopterids can also turn into specialized Breeder individuals, or build Breeding Devices. It depends on the societies they form.

Societies which are shaped by their environment. I'd imagine isolated Isopterid colonies would become insular and more prone to rigid caste systems whereas colonies on major space-lanes or co-inhabited worlds and multicultural places would have more loose "castes." The genetic information they carry, plus the actions of their pioneering ancestors, plus the choices they make, PLUS the radical body modifications and enhancements that come with specialization, has lots of implications for the individual Isopterid - and shapes the greater society as well.

And this, I think, would make a "humanized" and sort of kinda hopefully well thought out take or rendition of the hivemind space insect thing, with sensible rationales as to the formation of their societies.

The trick being the hivemind is NOT a psychic thing but rather just conformity through memetic inheritance and the obligations of ancestors and parents with responsibilities to pass on to the next generation of intrepid Isopterids safeguarding the futures of their fledgling space colonies, living under the shadow of their great colonist-pioneer promethean forebears (who transmogrified themselves into cyclopean bioforms to terraform their world!).

(The Karlack are less of hivemind space bugs and more of... the embodiment of the force of nature, specifically the force of life itself, an ecosystem of interstellar scale, with a metaphysical mind, yes, but the amorality and coolness and dispassionateness of the processes of natural selection and such. The grotesque, terrific and divine distillation of life itself.)
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

I ran this by PeZook.

Pawel: The colony phase bugs could be capable of secreting resins, which they'd shape into tools

Shroom: Yes, definitely. Though I'd assume they'd come with gear and not butt naked

Paweł: Yeah, but they could have rovers and such

Shroom: But they have to work with a combination of machines that might break

Paweł: And then when something breaks they secrete resin and make spare parts

Shroom: And super-organs that can be refueled by eating rocks

Paweł Żuk: Like 3d printers, only slimey and scary

Shroom: which they can detach! if unneeded, to save nutrition

Paweł: When they need a petrochemical refinery, they make take a hatchet and chop off a segment, hook up the organ to feedlines and have it refine fuel.

Shroom: Heck, one team member could be assigned to growing new organs, while the others are sleeker and wrestle sandworms for dinner

Paweł: The organ grower gets preference for rations

Sometimes they just use machine tools because it's faster, but some colonists can make a trickle of complex chemicals which they'd normally need huge industrial plants to make.

Shroom: Or shitting out organic symbiotes instead of drones (at this point shitting out self-aware children would be unethical)

Paweł: a hint of cybernetics here and there

Shroom: Cellular scale "soft" cybernetics. Can't grow hydraulic limbs in a womb, but nanite-enhanced muscle cells and stuff? Totally.

Paweł: Heh, if they can shit out non-sentient symbiotes, it could be delightfully creepy if other races DID perceive them as children and then the colonists would eat the drones to convert them into something else.

Shroom: Man, that is brilliant.

Paweł: Creeping people the hell out. For them it would be no different than taking a robot apart and using the parts of something else, or they shit out a sumbiote and tear the bain out to drive a machine.

Shroom: My friend says that there could be a twist, that when their planet becomes safe and habitable, they no longer need to have insane body augs and carapace, so when they shed that, it turns out THEY WERE HUMAN ALL ALONG!!!11
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