Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

They could keep down the Intervergence more with US Monroe Doctrine-style taking out of all their inhumanist Desecrated Arbenz Guzmans and Allendes. I think nuking them to stop them from having spaceflight is too much though. :D

But decapitating them when they get too organized, to the point of being able to project too much power and influence, would totally be happening.

Magi and Ministers of Fate and Meridian scienticianists and Calibrationists might be working at cross-purposes with each other and themselves. Like, some Magi might want the Intervergence to rise up but that's something the Avestavra would totally not stand for... A Minister of Fate Kylo trying to make something of himself there might get lightning-fried by a higher up dark lord Inquisitor with a grudge...

The institutional Shen cultural appropriation... that's a brilliant idea, expanding what Vic offered and making it even more obscene. Actual population transplants! PEOPLE ZOOS!
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

Maaan I was just extrapolating from what Invictus said, consider;

A: No political stability in this place, so if you set up an ally or puppet government it's not going to last long before (haha) fracturing into little statelets or going through some revolution or other. Keeping a handle on all that would be massively expensive.

B; Ideas aren't tied to the people who think them, so killing revolutionaries, even if you kill lots of them, burn all their leaflets and shut down their twitter feeds, is only a stopgap,their ideas will just float through the noosphere and ground themselves into the next oppressed mass.

C; This is an integral part of the place, not just normal psychohistorical trauma, it's a sociological Eye of Terror, so if you send your own governor in, they'll most likely go all Kurtz on you and need to be terminated with extreme prejudice.

That was my reasoning. Now it is possible I went a bit far with the conclusion or misjudged the scale of these problems and that the solutions don't need to be quite this harsh :? :D

Yeah. Yeah, probably :P

But in any case these places would be full of people working at cross-purposes, and all of it adding to the general chaos of the region.

I've wondered a lot about the meme-tributes of Shen and what kind of society that might support. Like, I think back to Vic's story with the planet that was 'the sorting house of sin' and I'm just wondering if there's something similar going on in Shen (and other places), an economy of ideas where you might have different stock markets based around value systems and take options out in the prevalence or the perceived worthiness of different beliefs, models of thought, phrases, games, songs, rituals...

I don't actually have anything coherent really because the I know very little about either philosophy or economics :P bit that’s where my mind has been wandering
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

The TAINTED MEMES' contagiousness is more than just in it making contact with people somewhere else - either by adherents traveling by spaceship or by spacebook memes crossing dataspheres (barring something insane like the Babylos Infall CYBERHELL's potential threat to the Solarian Datasphere) or by just the ideas themselves in the noosphere. It also depends on the memetic resiliency and environmental composition of the potential future victim, if they're pretty resilient and organized, then it'll take more than memetic/idea cross-noosphere pollination to bring down Grand Auriga and turn it into the Intervergence. The Grand Aurigan aristocrats and movers and shakers will have to mess up their society, the people will need to degenerate or something, for such a thing to come to pass - and I guess that's why the Avestavra are there, to stop such a thing from happening.

In the initial Cataclysm, Reignfall and Fracture, I really wonder what was the composition of the present-Intervergence for it to have fallen so much. The lack of proper manufacturing capabilities and spaceports and warpgates? So they were once the Earthreign equivalent of manicured suburbs far from the cities and with the Reignfall the highways degraded so they got pretty messed up.

^ That's without considering psionic esoterica, those Jabuzov-Aguirre phenomena and the things Magi deal with. Meridian computations might not be able to model such psi-esoterica as well - unlike Solarian CIs or something - but I think they'd still be on point. (Until someone rewrites the noosphere with some insane array made of cryst bones or something...)
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

We forgot that the Intervergence has the Intervergent Unterran Syndiktats that are Samtic protected! Compared to the other routinely ruinated Intervergence entities!
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Ah crap, I forgot, they weren't Samtic protected but my original post had the idea that they were Meridian supported - Foundation scientist types might be averse to seeing such a subpopulation genocided. So the peacekeepers there would really prevent the Aurigans or Sheppoes or whoever from nuking them just because they have (too many) spaceships... and it might check Shen's more outrageous forms of meta-appropriation.

And the existence of such a weird borderline non-human group would probably attract Samtic soft-influence that, while not directly officially constituting as Samtic military protection, would still result in passing pilgrims using those places as stopovers, and those pilgrims having official Samtic gov't protection.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

Meridian meddling would be a big part of why the UIS are more stable than the rest of the volume, with them trying to keep the local cultures more coherent. And the Meridians would try to get other planets to sign.up for it but these might just see it as further Euhumanist Imperialism and cultural desecration.

Kind of on that topic, I thought of some new buzzwords in Fracture identity politics.

Protohumanism: is what the bastardised White Child nazi offshoots follow, basically the the idea of recreating the original human culture and phenotype and then either re-desecrating everyone to fit that or, if that's too expensive, expelling,oppressing or killing them. Not all protohumanists are violent, but most protohumanist governments are.

Euhumanism: the opposite of the above, probably began as a Meridian project, basically aims to establish humanity as an umbrella cultural identity for everyone in the Fracture, more in terms of their shared heritage than their specific lineage. Has its abusers as well.

Alienism or antihumanism, is an extremist form of inhumanism, not only because it aims to kill humans, though it does, but because it also aims to unify the desecrated under a single culture, alliance and, ultimately, state. The more hardcore are sometimes called Altreigners and, because I want to make a reference that's way too good for me, some even say that the desecrated should 'consolidate' biologically towards a humanoid body and culture, since most of them are humanoid anyway.

Nexitism; is a branch of inhumanism that encourages biological and cultural diversification, whilst encouraging people to stay connected through a Web of mutual interests and a vague sense of inhuman solidarity. Notably welcoming of humans who don't fit in with any of the Fracture norms. The name was coined by the Grandeur to emphasise the ideological links between this philosophy and the Samtics, which do exist, but aren't as strong as the Aurigans would have you think.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

That is pure gold! Yes!

The Sheppoes would totally have protohumanist or paleohumanist or generally regressive trends too. Certain Sternheim sectors too.

Aurigans would be technically euhumanists...? but they are feudal pricks so yeah, hegemony and cultural hangups trumps the technical ideological minutae.

The Bragulan IBGV backed Cultural Byzonist brand of inhumanism would totally count as alienism extremism. Xenoism? What too good reference did you make with Altreigners? I am imagining wordplay on alt-right white supremacists IRL.

Nexitism? Sounds good. But folks trying to secede from the Samtic Nexus would also want to #NEXIT :D
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Minor tangent:

I think Solarian strike/war/dreadstars should be less wedge/dagger shapes and more... cavalry sabre+sharks ...curvier, longer and with more sharp parts, dorsal and pectoral fin things. Something with the angles of the Lampyridae and the FALKEN but with the layout of a Mako shark, the fins and the dorsals. The modern ones can have the sleeker, streamlined near-featureless surfaces, but the old ones can have rougher, hard metal pseudo-Star Destroyer textures... but the geometry should be the shark-sabre-stealth fighter thing.

The wedge dagger-blade... with dagger-blades for dorsal and pectoral fins!
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

Aurigans would either be Euhumanist or some other kind of humanism we could think up (aristohumanism? Pseudogearchy, because they're probably closest to the Earthreign in terms of their institutions?)They certainly want to exercise control over the whole Fracture and direct it's culture,and the sidereals show there is a place even for people of alien extraction. So yeah, that fits.

Shepherds are definitely proto/paleohumanists. Incidentally I know we don't have much on them but I sm imagining currently they are a bit like Farscape's Peacekeepers, living on their spaceships with most being born there but sometimes drafting pure humans from their client planets. Is that about right?

Yeah I noticed the #NEXIT thing just after I wrote it. Maybe it should be Nexism or Samtism or something :P

The reference was Animal Farm, with the most extreme Alienists actually desecrating themselves in the name of unity being the realisation at the end that the piggies are just like the Bastard Humans

I feel I am probably not politically aware enough to make Orwell references in general unless they're jokes... Also I have never actually read Animal Farm :D

The Alt-right comparison works though, especially if there are Altreigners in the Syndicates preaching the destruction of mankind and committing hate crimes against desecrated people they don't like, all while sheltering under Meridian law.

Also, I thought the name Altreigners would just be an insult, but if they actually adopt it, decrying human depravity whilst idolising the ultimate in human tyranny... Well that's quite some doublethink going on there, IGBV people are earning their Victory Vodka!

More Orwell, I know, but I've already started now.

On tangent: I approve. Those things look fantastically vicious, just what something called a 'dreadstar' should look like.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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I haven't read Animal Farm either... how did the animals desecrate themselves?

The Sheppoes... their spaceforce, I haven't seen Farscape properly, what I was going for was that their spaceforce would be all New Battlestar Galactica with alcoholic XOs, constipated captains, all making HARD CHOICES while being paranoid nuke-armed fuckers, with sociopath Mary Sue fighter aces and all that. While their terrestrial populaces and client states are like something out of Fallout - not the postnuclear wastelands (there can be a few sure), but the deranged Americanana gone wronggo in the Leave it to Beaver white picket fence 1950s but actually not-so-cryptofascist... techno-McCarthyist society.

ANTI-SAMTICITES! :D
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Lelouch vi Britannia »

In the sense that the revolution the animals started eventually went back on itself. They overthrew the humans, then they started adopting more and more of the humans' traits until, in the end, they were culturally indistinguishable from the humans they had initially rebelled against.

As for Fallout and the Shepherds: The Fallout universe is a place where an eccentric casino owner/robotics prodigy, survivalist hermits with buttloads of high explosives and automatic weapons, and a bunch of brains in jars with a penchant for mad science in all its forms can coexist alongside wannabe Romans with machetes and football pads. A lot of the more explicit Fallout references like the survivalist hermits and wannabe Romans (or something really close to them) would in all likelihood be out along the Sheppoes' fringe worlds, just more yokels who don't know where their loyalties lie.

I now wonder, do the Sheppoes also have replicants of their own?
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Mainstream Sheppoes would be more like the Enclave societies. Heck, Desecrated and inhuman variants that might exist in the Shepherds' Protectorate fringes might as well be our equivalent of SUPERMUTANTS!

The replicants might be the Sheppoes' paranoiac fears of alien/nano/posthuman/esper all-of-the-above intrusion. Even non-Sheppoes from the other ass backwards regions of the Fracture have similar fears... the Sheppoes just have the nukes to back their fears up. :D

(Also, actually the Shepherds' special forces high end units do include augmented brainwashed suicide-capable nuke-implanted agents who are infused with Karlack genes to give them added infested Terran lethality - like a combination of Predator/Commando and Prototype the game. And Eversor assassins from 40k. But with bad one liners instead of WWWWRRRRYYYYYY.)

The eccentric casino owners could be an added reference to the Old Battlestar Galactica CASINO PLANET that Shep (the SDN user) loves. These might be the border worlds that have turned to merchant hubs, instead of insularity and racism, their desperation-induced BUST A DEAL FACE THE WHEEL Bartertownness transforming them into pragmatic opportunists willing to deal with outsiders and even xenos. Meaning that they are just under the Protectorate and under the Shepherds Colonial Fleet chain of command primarily for convenience. All the Mr. Houses and Gaius Baltars and Arcturus Mengsks can chill out here. :D

The brains in the jar can be the Calibrationists (our TechPriest/AdMechs gone rogue). The Ceasar's Legions can be remade into paleotechno-/archaeotechno-barbarians, some of which are also in the NEUROM.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

Shroom Man 777 wrote:Ah crap, I forgot, they weren't Samtic protected but my original post had the idea that they were Meridian supported - Foundation scientist types might be averse to seeing such a subpopulation genocided. So the peacekeepers there would really prevent the Aurigans or Sheppoes or whoever from nuking them just because they have (too many) spaceships... and it might check Shen's more outrageous forms of meta-appropriation.
Shen appropriation is memetic appropriation. They take your cultural distinctiveness and package it and sell it back to the galaxy at large for the megabucks. A boiling cauldron of memes like an Intervergence would be a rich source of profit to them, especially since the natives can't shoot or sue back. They'd try to sabotage any Meridian attempts to stabilize the region, but they'd also sabotage any other power aiming for wholesale destruction.

The Shen also like to collect human tributes for HUNGER GAMES and reward the places where the winners come from with orgonic bread and other such impressive and dependency-causing luxuries, but that again feeds into their galactic entertainment-industrial complex.
Shroom Man 777 wrote:And the existence of such a weird borderline non-human group would probably attract Samtic soft-influence that, while not directly officially constituting as Samtic military protection, would still result in passing pilgrims using those places as stopovers, and those pilgrims having official Samtic gov't protection.
Individual members of the Samtic Nexus are quite capable of acting outside the auspices of the Nexus, yes.

And I also think that the "pilgrims" from the Nexus are largely humans. Humans from the League of Exilates, who in fact brandish their refugee status from their old territories in the Fracture quite proudly and even consider themselves to be the legitimate representatives of long-gone Fracture polities in exile. Their revanchist stance causes as much political trouble for both the politics of the Samtics and the existing Fracture polities as you'd imagine, especially when they're flaunting it while *in* the Fracture, but Shroom's right in that they're citizens of the Nexus and thus deserve official Samtic protection...as long as they stick to the pilgrimage stops.

Though this won't stop some of them (and other non-Exilate** humans, and other Samticoid aliens in general) from heading into the Syndiktats to spread Nexitist* memes. I suppose when they get into trouble, whether the Samtics are going to make any forceful intervention to rescue them will be a matter of circumstance. Only the lucky ones get to fly home with squid Bill Clinton.

*I actually have thought of a name for the prevailing Nexus ideology of coexistence and passively cultivating inter-connections through common context - Thalassanism. Build the ocean and they will come.

**The hippie-Polynesian transhuman nomads of the Hyperpacifica don't identify as Exiles, having thoroughly severed their ties with Grand Auriga and the Fracture in general to embrace the life aquatic. I suppose they sometimes pilgrimage to the Fracture too, but that's more like their equivalent of hitting the Hindu Kush.
Shroom Man 777 wrote:Aurigans would be technically euhumanists...? but they are feudal pricks so yeah, hegemony and cultural hangups trumps the technical ideological minutae.
As a broad academic category, probably, but then again good luck getting each Noble House to think that their own brand of transhumans aren't the best, and that their definition of "the best" means that they can in fact do without all the other Noble Houses. The Grandeur is set up for its aristocracy to be dependent on each other, and the Avestavra are in its way quite keen to prevent the emergence of a Kwisatz Haderach ubertranshuman line to rule them all. I mean remember what Paul Atreides did at the end of the first book - he sent the Fremen into space to have a UNIVERSAL JIHAD to slaughter billions. And his successor God-Emperor Slug-Man Leto II had some sort of plan to maximally oppress humanity for thousands of years to ensure the species' survival. None of this thematically flies with the mission of the Magi, especially with the stronghold of high broderist both-sides-have-a-point Magi that is the Grandeur.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

At least one of the Y-K-Z species would be in the Nexus right?
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

So, a lot of shit went down between the Samtic Nexus and the early Fracture. Shroom and I brought up the idea of a Terran Ascension ( :mrgreen: ), a proto-democratic, last best hope for federation type polity that then had its shit pushed in by the proto-Grandeur of Auriga, cementing the latter's humanist street cred as well as the conservatism of the prevailing memetic tides at the expense of well, what could have influenced the Fracture as a whole in a more xeno-tolerant and diverse direction. Maybe the Samtics, once they saw out the Earthreign's fall and were getting tired of launching a hundred inhumanitarian interventions everywhere, backed the wrong horse.

At the same time, I mentioned that a wave of Samticoid political dissidents and opportunists were also sweeping into the territory of the disorganized humans, seeing their own disorganized attempt at setting up their own new frontiers, or just to revanchize whatever the Nexus lost during the intermittent border conflicts between it and the Earthreign. I don't imagine they kept a lot of the territory they seized, especially without much official backing, but it didn't help with general human perceptions of the perfidious mollusk threat etc. etc.

But the worst incident, the one that caused the most long-term trauma and paranoia among the Fracture-dwellers, was the Imagotabula War. So while the initial foray of the Samticoid filibusters mentioned in the previous paragraph didn't do so well, another faction of Nexusians, this time consisting of bodydwelling symbiotes not unlike the primordial Xenotomb brain-worms, launched a far more careful operation. They realized that subtlety was the key, and what did they and their vastly superior biotech have to fear from the divided and technologically regressing human societies? So millions upon millions of them re-engineered their biologies to be human-compatible and infiltrated their way across the Fracture. They will build their own secret societies under the noses of their unsuspecting hosts. And if their hosts start suspecting, the symbiotes have more direct means of taking control.

But then things start going wrong, much in the same way the Overlords found when in their proto-Samtic hosts. The symbiotes start identifying with human allegiances and values rather than stay as detached puppet-masters. Their large-scale strategies start to grow muddled and they splinter into competing factions, and start employing their hosts and *their* assets to fight each other. From the human perspective, inexplicable shadow wars start flaring up, conspiracist memes start running wild, and the resultant waves of instability throw wide swathes of spacemericas into turmoil.

Worse still, sharing the same headspace with a human brain start making the Samticoid symbiotes vulnerable to the Fracture's influence. This really makes the Samtic Nexus panic about potential human meme-cooties being transmitted back into its borders, so it takes drastic action. Khelerene Empty Bower operators are sent into the Fracture to discreetly track down the symbiotes, unleash deniable revenant proxies that add further to the confusion, and start anonymously equipping human Blacksuit agents everywhere with ultratech weaponry. The Samtics send their own symbiote host-agents into human societies in long-term operations to root out the initial symbiotes. When cornered, the corrupted symbiotes resort to their own biotech to make their hosts Guyver out, and their hunters respond in kind. Streets and worlds would erupt into sudden Guyver battles with massive collateral damage. Even as the general populace descends into more panic and paranoia, the more cognizant human polities are also pointing angry fingers at the Nexus, which is alternately issuing equally angry denials and making hidden concessions to cover things up.

And the terrible shadow war goes on in the Fracture for decades, maybe even a century before Imagotabula activity is driven below visible levels. But the damage and the repercussions lingered, and no one is even sure if the original symbiotes aren't living on in some further perverted form.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Sounds like a right and proper clusterfuck! And imagine, this probably happened before the Joxundra and Y-K-Z and the Telyc shenenigans that finally gave the Samtics the footholds/pseudopodholds the intial infiltrators wanted.

I am wondering what occurred to these Samtic Goa'uld and Tok'ra ( :P ) who might have encountered the various psi-capable parties back then?
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

Shroom Man 777 wrote:Sounds like a right and proper clusterfuck! And imagine, this probably happened before the Joxundra and Y-K-Z and the Telyc shenenigans that finally gave the Samtics the footholds/pseudopodholds the intial infiltrators wanted.

I am wondering what occurred to these Samtic Goa'uld and Tok'ra ( :P ) who might have encountered the various psi-capable parties back then?
Well, employing psions are the natural way to pick out another mind lurking in some perfectly unremarkable human body, so I imagine they were very valued just for that. If the Magi were around by then, they might have helped uncover whatever cells of the Imagotabula that have infiltrated the Grandeur, and thus solidify their position with the gene-aristocrats who are as you'd imagine very big on genetic integrity. Infested espers may even be capable of fighting back by themselves, though I can see some particularly formidable hosts emerging if the brain-worm found a way to subvert its host's psionic faculties instead. Deadliest still are the trained Psi-Guyvers (Psyvers?) dispatched by the Nexus, themselves Fracture-descended human psions armed with the best weaponized biotech the Samtics can provide. I'm not entirely sure if the Cryst have joined by then, but if they had, that's another potential living psionic sensor/talking transformation gadget right there.

I'm also presuming that travel was difficult in the early Fracture before everyone had time to settle down into big power blocs and rebuild the warpgates, so the Imagotabula spread in the regions closest to the Nexus but not all across the Fracture. Thus the proto-NEUROM zones, the Shepherds and so on didn't see so much of the threat, but just imagine the purge of Sidereal bloodlines, the setting of negative precedents for biotech use, the unhelpful drive towards panopticon and social control, the sudden power to those Desecrated clades who prove resistant to infestation and the planting of Alienism's seeds.

That's not to count all the epic tales of cat-and-mouse, the three-way battles between the Imagotabula, the hunters from the Nexus and the authorities who want to vivisect them both for advanced Samtic biotech. The turncoats, the compromised agents, the human collaborators who were seduced by the promise of living on as immortal brain worms who can wear whatever host they like; the organizations and ideologies the Imagotabula started that lived on in some form; the desperate embrace of Isopterid implants by other factions to combat the Guyvers with their own wearable Guyvers; brain worms arguing that they're doing nothing wrong by growing blank clone bodies to inhabit, etc. etc. It's a whole mini-setting in and of itself.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Either the proto-Shepherds and the proto-NEUROM eventually heard of what was happening in the "eastern Fracture" and their paranoid tendencies meant that they used this as another justification for their xenophobic ways even though the Imagotabulan combatants were far away from them... or the Imagotabula War was actually a multi-generational one and when the proto-NEUROM and the proto-Sheps developed, there were still Imagotabula leftovers that eventually drifted into the new frontier of the western Fracture, giving the still-wobbly NEUROM and Sheppoes another problem to deal with.

What is the name source for the Imagotabula btw?
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

Shroom Man 777 wrote:Either the proto-Shepherds and the proto-NEUROM eventually heard of what was happening in the "eastern Fracture" and their paranoid tendencies meant that they used this as another justification for their xenophobic ways even though the Imagotabulan combatants were far away from them... or the Imagotabula War was actually a multi-generational one and when the proto-NEUROM and the proto-Sheps developed, there were still Imagotabula leftovers that eventually drifted into the new frontier of the western Fracture, giving the still-wobbly NEUROM and Sheppoes another problem to deal with.
It just turns into more and more of a clusterfuck in its implications, doesn't it? The brain-worms could pass detection if they just ditched their schtick and settled down, living on purely in their memes - but of course, the precise situation here is that the terror and paranoia for the Imagotabula did live on memtically long after they were gone.
Shroom Man 777 wrote:What is the name source for the Imagotabula btw?
imago + tabula = Imagotabula. I came up with it in a hurry so it's honestly a bit shoddy and should be considered a working name.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Siege »

That's yet another impressive addition to an increasingly dense setting, guys. And actually I can see how the Shephards' doctrine of nuking the site from orbit follows from having sudden inexplicable eruptions of mindworm psyker on super-bio-freakazoid ultraviolence in the middle of cities. If your own woefully unprepared soldiers can't fight them on their terms, cordon off the site, nuke it until it glows and start from scratch on the glass. That would engender a callous disregard for collateral damage I'd think. As well as a raging hateboner for anything vaguely alien and / or sinister.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

This is why inhumanist-trending, eco-cosmozoanist hippies and such are also regarded with such suspicion.

And - ironically - why in the face of these Guyvering mindworm biofreakazoids (amongst other things like NEUROM Ministry of Fate Sithquisitioners with beamsabers) the Sheppoes probably began their OMEGA UNIT programs to carefully create their own biofreakazoids out of synthetically Karlack-infested Terran Marines :D
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Perhaps in their mind their habitual nuking until the glowy glass appears is ULTRA RATIONAL MOTHER WIT DOCTRINE. Because if psykers and guyvers and sithmans know that within minutes of them starting a kerfuffle in a Sheppo city the vast array of ORBITAL DEATH SATELLITES will rain unholy atomic hell down upon them irrespective of their surroundings, they won't dare start a kerfuffle!

I mean it's just common MAD, right? RIGHT?!

Meanwhile their cities are so hardened, compartmentalized, bunkerized and redundandized that a few nukes will just take out at most a couple tens of thousands of random bystanders with little to no disruption to the overall planetary functioning, so blowing giant craters in their own planets is a perfectly acceptable price to pay for vaporizing THE ALIENOID (or so reason the leaders safely tucked away in deep bunkers or permanently orbiting Nightwatch doomsday control spacecraft.)

It's MAD!
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Since they lack super-psykers and the more excessive xeno-mutaloid tech, this would be their most sensible recourse, I think. And it's not that far-fetched even IRL. And I guess in this respect, a lot of their methods are similar to the Bragulans (always has, even in SDNW). Even if they don't have the imperialism, the ideology and the other ridiculous things that enabled the Bragulans to strangle their half of the K-Zone.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

The Shepherds' Protectorate would be a bigger dog in the Fracture than it is right now if its society and ideology actually allows for expansion, instead of being wrapped in what is essentially an absurd defensive crouch. (Unless, of course, its ideology is an absurd defensive crouch...)

Nevertheless, I'm imagining a society where the Founding Admirals are not only held in quasi-cultic esteem, but whose passions and dramas form the memetic foundations of culture. They use NBSG quotes as proverbs, repeated with Maoist reverence in everyday conversations. Pilots going "Starbuck" is not just a metaphor for going rogue, but actually a Black Rage-like psychological disorder where they forget who they are and actually relive being the mythological Starbuck. And then still function adequately in Shepherd military culture, because it hasn't changed that much.

On an entirely different topic, Archeosophism is the Fracture belief/religion/practice of venerating hybers for their longevity, and hoping that by emulating their alien practices/making pilgrimages to their xenotombs/swearing spiritual allegiance to their survivors/actually trying to remake themselves with hyber biotech and arising anew as lazaral lords, they can transcend the dead end of Fracture society/inherit the flame of civilizational vitality from these successful survivors/live better lives/live forever. Its adherents form part of the pilgrims to the Telyc and YZR territories, albeit for different reasons than all those alien the Nexusite pilgrims. While more spiritual and less of a macro-eugenic* ideology than Speaker's -humanisms, most Fracture powers still look down upon Archeosophism for understandable reasons. At least it's more harmless than Calibrationism, though.

*Or whatever our dark transhumanist future eventually decides to call the study of what kind of modified human type best forms a society and how to engineer such a state.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

As long gestated in the cthonic realms of chat, more usual, less remarkable Bounty species who are members of the beleaguered Sajit'Satyk:

The V/riew (the "/" sound only being fully pronounceable with their metallic mouthparts) are tiny hummingbird-like creatures with atypical amounts of trace metals incorporated into their biology. They are probably individually sapient, but naturally form flock intelligences that communicate and coordinate through ultrasonic pulses and/or heliotropic signals by glittering light off their reflective feathers, performing manual tasks in groups through their beaks. This, combined with their natural hyperactivity, makes them strong tinkerers and lets them fill metakarmic niches concerning all the places that the lumbering space serengeti species can't reach. They're also chatty chamberlains and messengers, though not exactly the deepest thinkers.

Modern V/riew flocks live in large (by their standards) ramshackle nest-mecha and have little compunction against involving them in social conflicts. I presume they also use smaller mecha to interact with larger creatures where force is required.

The Kalaquelle, from Shroom, are the hyena-marmot everyman species of the Sajit'satyk, mainly noted for being immensely populous. I mean seriously there are lots of them, dwelling under unimaginable social pressures in mountain-sized hive cities. To deal with this, they have semi-lethal block wars, waging periodic entertainment-battle with paleoweapons in their twisting warrens, spiced up anything from ER to spare rent bodies to virtual control and live music. It's kind of looked down upon by the Sajit, even with all kinds of rules in place.

Most recently, I also have a not yet named species that does the thinking and administrating for the Sajit'satyk, under the Sajit. They resemble massive hippo/manatees, with the richer, more privileged members of their species being more on the manatee end and utterly massive to boot. The recent fortunes of their polity, however, have been predictably hard on their indolent, comfortably water-cooled existences.
"This explanation posits that external observation leads to the collapse of the quantum wave function. This is another expression of reactionary idealism, and it's indeed the most brazen expression."
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REBUILD OF COMIX STAGE 1 - Rey Quirino Versus the Dark Heart of the Philippines
"...a literary atrocity against the senses..." - Ford

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