Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

All of the above. In the game, we had border worlds with the Cevaucians so you can also have enormous supervillain crime syndicates blowing shit up thereabouts.

There could be some CIs, or some authorities over some of those places, that prefer to keep things simple and un-cyberpunk-crazified.

Baylor might experience some of the debauchery of inner-USS before he comes to the conclusion that the fringe is actually more sensible.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Siege »

He might visit the Core when he's hired as a private detective to do... something, for which he's uniquely suited because he's a former soldier and he doesn't have a head full of cybergear.

Or it's simply that Replicants always muster out at USMC HQ, which is in the core.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Ford Prefect »

I'll just say I like the idea of Baylor trying to retire to some far off farming colony on the fringe (which is really an air conditioned resort where you run automated harvester machines for luxury goods). Trying being the operative word, as it's hard to escape the pull of the core even when you really, really want to.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Well, when you head out, the first thing that pops into your brain especially when you haven't a clue isn't really "head off into the edge of the nation away from the key centers of everything".

Maybe flashforward to Baylor chilling in the fringe, maybe getting a job later on to go to the core, and him going "oh man, i hate that place".
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Ford Prefect wrote:I'll just say I like the idea of Baylor trying to retire to some far off farming colony on the fringe (which is really an air conditioned resort where you run automated harvester machines for luxury goods). Trying being the operative word, as it's hard to escape the pull of the core even when you really, really want to.
Would that "pull of the core" in fact be political forces marshalling pawns untainted by any existing coreworld allegiances for some...overt power plays? ;)

That may in fact be why fringe world yokels remain yokels despite the USS possessing all the political capital and communications technology to make them not so. The fringe worlds being a deliberate social escape valve is one thing, but what if they are also a reserve that can be injected back into the Core to clean it up a bit when it gets a bit too incestuous? And of course, certain USS bigwigs may find it useful to keep a bunch of Varangians around...
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Very interesting. There could have been other posthuman societies before the USS, or contemporary to them, but gradually these societies ended up becoming too detached from mortality or becoming too sterile or too aseptic and it became something that made them stale dour and stagnant or something? So the USS deliberately maintains some form of hi-lo mix of societies, calibrated to maintain some strange idiosyncratic balance that nonetheless maintains the strange dynamic of its society?
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Siege »

Wouldn't that itself imply a form of stagnation?

In my mind it'd make more sense if the Core is only slowly expanding because, well, what's the rush? Even with gee-what hypertech it presumably takes a while to transmute an entire solar system worth of resources into Space iPods or other consumables; the Core expands only as fast as it needs resources. In that sense the Sovereignty could resemble a singularity supernova, an unstoppable shock front of data and metamorphosis and depletion expanding into the galaxy, and everyone that doesn't want to be swept away by the transhuman madness of it all has no choice but to be constantly moving deeper into space. The frontier, then, isn't so much a static thing: rather it is mobile state of noncomformity that spills out just ahead of the technological singularity, like foam and flotsam on the crest of a wave.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

That works too. I like that.

Anyway. As we discussed yesterday, and am now discussing with Vic too...



The Myrran are a feudal society dominated by noble houses, each noble family in essence owning all the land and the populace living in its territories. Now the thing with Myrran is that their felinoid constitution means that they'd prefer to be left well alone, and so they value space at a premium. Territory. Turf. A place to be one with yourself. The nobles can get entire continents to themselves, while merchants and middle class can have rustic expanses to situate their communities in, while baseborn commoners are aggregated into sprawling cities that rim the edges of their lord's domain - kept to the boundaries as though undesirable.

The whole Myrranii system is determinant on the concept of territory, and solitude. Somehow, someway, a functional society of people who'd prefer to be alone by themselves. The lords and ladies don't actually live in great castles, since a castel would imply living with a multitude of servants. They would have idyllic gardens, temples to their selves and their solitude. And whatever servants they have would have to undertake various rituals. The presence of others, in the Myrranii is most tolerable if those others are beneath your standing, especially if they're subservient to you and yours. So the servants in the presence of their masters will be dressed in garments displaying signs of subservience. And there can be gestures such as averting one's gaze from one's betters. In higher houses, with more eccentric and upper-class members, faces can be concealed entirely. Or servants to a lord's court have to master the art of blending into the environment. Not quite literally, it can be enough for servants in a certain section of the master's dwelling to wear attire that matches the surrounding's color.

Those who live in the cities, the commoners, live in the worst conditions of all - in the squalor of others' company.Their betters, minor nobles who are granted at least authority in these crammed cities, are given their own towers where they can at least have their own space. And part of the reasons why these cities are situated at the edges of the territories of a high noble is so that, when these territories touch the borders of another noble's territory, then these cities will be near the cities of that other house. So if there are any disputes between the houses, the commoners can be rallied to fight for their betters, as it should be. And, at the edges, of course so they can be far away from the inner sanctums of their lords.

Myrranii value most individuality and isolation. This is even reflected in their combat. Where massed infantry and units are considered low and inferior in equipment. And where the deadliest machineries are wielded by masterfully trained warriors who themselves are nobles, and who are charged with the command of armies of baseborn troops. Each of these noble commanders, in their chosen machines, can be absolutely lethal engines of war. At the height of their vanity, their chosen machines can be sculpted into the likeness of the Myrrani form and adorned with banners. Fighting between the houses has all sorts of ritualistic rules, because no one wants to lose all their titles and lands and end up being thrown into the cities to live as a commoner. Their psychology is feline. Cats prefer to be alone. Most of their social system is based on this.

According to their religion. This is so because once upon a time there was a tyrant king who made himself a god. He had a machine called the Throne of Souls. Which, through its arcane powers, unified the Myrranii people. The prospects of being unified and together is actually distasteful for a people who prefer to be alone. So the messiah of the Myrran, say the Myrran'kan, fought this ancient warlord.
In ritualistic combat. She slayed him, and she ran her songblade through the Throne of Souls. Destroying the unity of the Myrranii and making them as they are today, a people who loathe the sight of each other. And now the queen of the Myrr sits on the throne in a patch of void at the heart of Myrran territory where there is nothing. The place is called Solace. And aside from the Queen With No Soul on her Throne, there is nothing. Only the greatest Myrrani heroes get their entombed bodies drifted into the void of Solace.

Their theme is social isolation, solitude, selfishness, greed, conspiracy, avarice, disunity and division, the anti-thesis of the Zigonian. The fanged clawed scaly reptiles in SOTS are the nice friendly folks, the smexy adorable catgirls are the loathesome loners who hate all.

Myrran prefer to die alone. In ancient days, an honorable death would be either being thrown off a cliff, thrown off a boat to drown, or thrown down a well.

Technologies of automation, that mean that you don't need to have extensive crews of Other People, are at a premium in the Myrran. And their version of the admech, an eccentric technologist house of extreme loners, are masters of crafting intricate faceless robotic servants. In some houses, the servants have to wear masks in the likeness of their masters, to appease their narcissism. These masks could change in form, to be similar to the faces of the particular noble family member they are addressing. Or simply their faces are covered in mirror masks. Mid-level noble families can settle with simple gestures and rituals of absement and so have servants around just bowing and wearing ritual clothes. But higher level families that prefer faceless servants, hidden ninja invisible servants, or robot servants think that the mid-levels are low-class.


Middle class at least have parks and rustic semi-rural homesteads. Upper-middle at least. The professionals. Scientists and doctors, they get nicer non-shit non-dystopian non-crammed areas to live in.

Vic: Each Myrran wants as much of everything to themselves as possible, and for this aspiration to have value there must be a finite amount of stuff. So they also value the material, and authenticity.

Me: Yes. And the lords own everything. So to have something, a plot of land, a space to breathe in, it must be given by the lord. And it must be earned through service. So this is why aloneness is so valued. Meditate, be with the self.

Vic: It lets them forget that they have masters. In that case, a bit of inner space would have to do. The struggle between solitude and dominance. Are both equally important? Or is the former a reaction to the latter?

Me: Through dominance you can gain solitude. Through subservience your solitude is taken. Or granted. Or bestowed.

Vic: And through solitude, you can bear being dominated.

Me: Through righteous subservience you can be allowed some solitude. And the ones who dominate do so to ensure ultimate solitude.

Vic: I imagine the current society is a hard-fought equilibrium.

Me: It varies between the houses. So this is why some are content to have servants in strange garb and doing ritual abasements, while others want faceless sculpted robot slaves, some outcast houses use alien mercenaries
and treat them as shitty pawns but somehow prefer using them over their own kind. So its a dynamic between solitude and property, and the relation to domination and subservience. The higher up the ladder you are, the more you can own in terms of things and space, and the more space you own, the more distance you have from others of your own kind.

Vic: Seriously, do you really need that much space (a continent?!) to achieve perfect solitude?

Me: The lord's continent has huge sprawling cities, and other of his land alloted to peasants

Vic: It seems to me that beyond a certain point, the stuff you own goes back to domination again. If you only need that much to achieve solitude, anything you want beyond that is just flaunting your status or to make sure that someone else doesn't have it.

Me: Which is a necessary thing, in these feudalistic nightmares a high lord can own a world with two continents
one for himself, and another he fills full of commoner megacities just because. And all the other lesser lords are envious.


Vic: You mention feudalism. Does this mean your noble can own stuff indirectly? So your high lord has a continent but it's actually divided between twenty barons mostly but that's okay because they're the high lord's barons and then those lesser barons maintain the land for him and lets the high lord have a nice view of it whenever he wants to or something. But the rest of the time, they lord over their fiefdoms themselves, because realistically a Myrran can only do so much with his time.


Me: Just like the nobles who rule in the cities, up huge towers that give them some solitude and they eternally scheme to get to higher positions in the countryside or better yet in space cause ruling over a city full of people is disgraceful.


Vic: Or maybe they emphasize the dominance to make up for it which makes the cities even more horrible.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Here's what I envision a typical Myrran world looks like:

From orbit, the primary continent is visibly scored into a grid of massive squares, each containing wide variations of geography and each ruled over by a single baron at the behest of the High Lady of the world. Each baron may well be connected to their liege lady as consorts as well as feudal vassals, and they sculpt the landscapes under their watch as much as in accordance with her aesthetic whims as much as to their own tastes. Grand hunts and war-games are waged over the vast chessboard, where barons and the armigers under their service compete for renown among their peers, breeding favor, and the opportunity to be picked by their liege to handle off-world tasks. It after these raucuous displays of dominance where the artificiality of these garden landscapes are most evident: when robotic tenders, servants and tribes of untouchable lowlies in force out of seemingly nowhere and labor to restore and extensive (if cosmetic) damage done to the terrain. Otherwise, each fiefdom seems inhabited, or at least shockingly sparsely populated by the standards of an industrialized, starfaring civilization. The more ostentatious estates and pavilions, built to be airy but still imposing, are the personal manses and retreats of the barons and their immediate huskarls. More rustic residences, almost like rural homesteads, belong to gentry and knights who are granted sub-fiefs of even smaller size and privilege. The scale shrinks down with each level of the feudal hierarchy, the sole exceptions being collections of buildings which can almost tolerate being grouped together as hamlets out of necessity, where merchants, professionals, and other non-landowning middle class dwell.

But all this is worlds away from how the servants exist. For those barons who favor faceless and mindless servile robots, cunningly concealed hatches to vast underground maintenance complexes will do. For those hailing from clans where strict formalism holds the reins, servant's quarters may seem as ostentatious as the mansions of their lords to the uneducated eye, but are regulated by unspeakably strict routines of symbolism and taboo so that their sheer presence can be tolerated. For those born into this life, even the slightest deviation from routine may invite the fatal fury of their social betters. It can be argued that they are still more fortunate than the lowly gardeners who tend to yet other fiefdoms - forbidden from speech, writing or wearing clothes, these Myrrans are condemned to an animal-like existence, for such utter abasement is yet another method to soothe the Myrran need for solitude while maintaining the bare fundamentals of their society.

The grid-like boundaries of the chessboard fiefdoms are massive artificial canyons cut into the ground itself; this is the form the world's Frontier City takes, because the High Lady decided that building upward would block the view. The network of narrow metropoli contains most of the world's economic and social activity but also its least privileged members. Here the Myrran residents have to bear their species' aversion against proximity *and* cramped spaces, and here all that maintains social order is ascetic discipline, bloody repression, and the biding ambition to acquire what has been denied to them by their betters. Only in those rare occasions where the nobles need the extra labor do they venture out and gain a look at the beautiful estates that they have been isolated from.

Smaller continents on the world may be similarly divided up but on a smaller scale, ruled by relatives of the High Lady who are not exactly her vassals but acknowledge her as their superior. Other, baron-sized fiefdoms may be created out of islands and other unique pieces of terrain, handed over to the equivalent of the High Lady's consieglieres, special, but not necessarily trusted. The ocean is another matter - with no easily defined boundaries, large swathes of it may belong to the High Lady outright, and barons may get stretches of coastal sea based on the location. But the essence is that everything - and almost everyone - has an owner.

Myrrans seem to be based around the twin values of dominance and solitude; both are means and both are ends.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

I love this. Though I don't think the gardeners should be naked and be treated that inhumanely. Sack cloth and ramshackle huts and such will do.

What a loathsome feline civilization.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Ford Prefect »

Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps and you too can be Shere Khan.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Ford Prefect wrote:Pull yourselves up by your bootstraps and you too can be Shere Khan.
Well, not that space feudal societies like the Myrrans' are known for their social mobility. But much of that society will look like a bunch of Space Shere Khans prowling their own space jungles.

There probably is some form of social mobility for Myrrans, despite the very few number of them who can be at the top at a time due to their inhumanly intense instincts for solitude and domination, which is due to the fact that there's only so much turf out there. There's only two ways to solve this - clear out the people at the top, or conquer more turf. The latter is probably more preferable to the people at the top, creating new titles and fiefdoms allowing their underlings to move up while extending their own influence. The downtrodden also get an outlet in terms of what they can expect to earn through war, and also gives them a motivation to put up with stuff like forced bonding and deferred vendettas that actually allow rank and file Myrran troops to fight as cohesive military units.

It's interesting to speculate on how many of these blood-bonded or vendetta'd types have found their way to the top of Myrran society as the Shere Khan types, just to see what the lingering effects of their former condition would be like, if there is any. Shroom and I have been discussing how Myrrans use mutual animosity as a kind of attraction and generally delve in depths of negative interpersonal feelings to the point where they use the born sociopaths among them as esteemed diplomats. It says something about them that they consider the Gift of Soullessness (that is, their almost pathological aversion behavior) as a blessing compared to what they used to be, and that treating everyone around them as mere tools and objects to be used to be a step up from what they typically want to do to others of their own kind.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Ford Prefect »

A society like this strikes me as really volatile, even if that's how they're socialised and how their brain chemistry works. You'd think that even if the guys at the top are physiologically averse to playing nice to their underlings in any way, they'd at least present society with a tiny kernel of hope.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

Oh, one does wonder what Myrran society looks like on the galactic level, especially how their interact when their expansion press upon the territories of other spacefaring species who won't stand for their shenanigans.

In any case, Shroom and I have proposed to insulate the Myrrans from our main players (probably to their fortune) by placing them at one remove from the Space Korpulu Sector, with the old and established power that is the Samtic Nexus between them and the Human Sphere and the Bragulans and so forth.

As for the Samtic Nexus, I'll get a long post up about them when I have more time, or unless Shroom gets here first.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

What I'd like to know is how you could involve remote communications and computer networking into this horrible society. Like, would these people communicate with each other via computers as much as possible so as to avoid actually interacting with one another? And when people have to talk to someone of their own rank would they use as many levels of your-people-calling-my-people as possible so as to avoid any kind of direct contact, so that everything is appropriately filtered for them?

EDIT: And also, and this is kind of the main snag with postulating a society of complete sociopaths, how do they raise their children? I mean, if they're felinoids I assume that they're mammal-like, so they do raise their children, but more than that, if they have a system of nobility that suggests that family and inheritance are critically important to them, so they must have some kind of family connection. Maybe they are basically raised by computers to one degree or another?

I also just realised, of course, that making these things into anything that looks like a criticism of social media might look a mite hypocritical for an idea created on an internet message board :P

I think that the logical endpoint of this, and I'm sorry if you guys have already thought of it, is a weird kind of reflection of Shroom's idea that Byzon may not be alive anymore: The average Myrran may have every reason to believe that the Queen with no Soul does not actually exist, because she never interacts with her subjects, but the truth is that although she does exist, she does not believe that anyone else does. Every bit of information the Queen receives is delivered in the most impersonal way possible, through computers that deliver reports to her in the form of dry data, so she never has to deal with any other living being, to her, ruling her realm is like managing a filing system or playing Civilisation, and it may well be she actually thinks she is the only living thing in the universe, and she's just doing this to help her pass the time.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Siege »

That, Speaker, is an absolutely fantastic idea and I love it.

The matter of "how the hell do they raise offspring" is a tricky one. Their population growth is probably small, but I also suppose their sociopathy might be a matter of degrees. At the commoner level years of being forced to live in close proximity, helped by ritualization and endless etiquette, probably makes individuals into something at least resembling sociable. It's only at the top of the feudal pyramid where you have individuals who don't need to learn to interact with other Myrrans end up being completely sociopathic fuckwits. So the higher up the food chain you go, the more psycho people get. Hell, maybe some of the noble houses just use their own genetic material to fabricate a clone that they then pawn off to the servants to raise.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

Here's something more pleasant concocted between Shroom and I: the Samtic Nexus.

The Nexus is a venerable federation of species nestled somewhere on the edges of the Korpulu Sector the general volume of space around the USS that we don't seem to have a name for yet, largely led and maintained by the eponymous Samtics, a species of post-mollusc colony creatures. They have in recent galactic history suffered a string of military and political losses against the Bragulans, the SOTSS equivalent of the Cervaucian Ascendency and others, creating the perception that they are a power in decline. It is true that Samtic influence has diminished throughout the Sector, and Nexus mediators and peacekeepers are welcomed no longer for their equanimous impartiality but for the fact that their fleets and armies of Covenant-like multispecies grunts in blue helmets are no real threat once other powers have decided that they're past their usefulness. However, their relative decline has more to do with the explosive inflation of Bragulan and USS power more than anything else, as seen by the fact that the Nexus has been guarding their other flank quite successfully against Myrran expansion for something as long as centuries. Nevertheless, the Samtics have proven unable to adapt quickly enough to the shifts in astropolitics that led to the current status quo, and this have seen their firm slide into the second tier.

The Samtics started out as at least two species of underwater molluscs which grew into close dependency alongside any of a large but more peripheral class of symbiotic organisms - the more ammonite-like member of the mutualist combine was responsible for growing a shell that was big enough not only to harbor itself but also the more squid-like member, which used its mobility to seek food and sense threats, and maybe even to help the shell-host reproduce by couriering its genetic material, in exchange for protection. Throw a species of immobile squid-anemones and various micro-organisms into the mix, and each proto-Samtic was in fact an entire colony of cooperating creatures. Still, this did not lead them to true sapience, not to mention civilization; as a marine species, factors were stacked against them. Until they awoke the slaver-worms.

The slaver-worms, as legends recount, were once mighty creatures that strode among the stars, until a curse was cast upon them to inexorably degenerate in stature until they became nothing at all. By the time they sequestered themselves in deathlike sleep in an attempt to forestall any further decline, they were already reduced to Gou'ald-like parasites, mere vestigial intellects imprisoned in soft slugs. This however didn't mean that they didn't leap at the chance when the proto-Samtics stumbled upon their cyclopean xenotombs in the ocean-bottoms of the Samtics' forgotten homeworld. The slaver-worms inserted themselves into the proto-Samtic colony and took it over, swiftly enslaving the entire species. Thus, with the ill-suited but nevertheless capable bodies of their hosts, the slaver-worms were able to take back to the stars, or at least bootstrap themselves back into a reasonably technological society, albeit adapted for the physical needs of their hosts. This would prove to be fortuitous in the long run.

But perhaps the Curse ran on, or perhaps the worms' body-hijacking protocols were imperfectly implemented, or perhaps some external factor such as a plague drove the slaver-worms too deep into dependency upon their hosts' biology, or perhaps even inconceivably, some Samtics became aware of their slavery and worked secretly to end it - but the result was that one day much of the slaver-worms, sheltered by Samtic shells, bathing in Samtic endocrine processes, seeing through Samtic senses, treating the welfare of the Samtics as their own...simply woke up and realized that they were the Samtics. And thus were the true Samtics born, who threw off the yoke of their legendary oppressors not through violent revolution or repulsive repudiation, but from an act of ultimate integration.

And as they got on the course of progressing as a technological civilization, the Samtics gradually became post-Samtics in all but name: their individual colony members streamlined and specialized into special organs and post-organs, but also uplifted to become full-fledged sophants with their own rights and responsibilities within the Samtic collective. The shell of a modern Samtic is a intricate hardtech construct housing computronium, power generation, life support and automation for a good deal of processes that used to be the responsibilities of colonial creatures in its ancestors, giving the colony the equivalent of a 35-hour workweek. The shell even contains the antigrav and forcefield generation that allows each Samtic to hover about in their own bubble of seawater. An individual Samtic is a political consensus between its components, a little ship floating in the world, its crew working in physiological and even neurological concert but otherwise remaining as distinct individuals. A captain of the collective is selected, perhaps even elected - it would enjoy overall command over the Samtic 'individual' but would be required to listen to input and advice from the other post-organs. Most post-organs are doubled up in the Samtic, not only for redundancy's sake but also so that the more junior post-organ can be apprenticed to the senior until they can fully mature and go form the 'bridge crew' of a new Samtic.

One can also argue that the Samtic Nexus is an extension of the way Samtics work - as a shell created around the Samtic polity to shelter it from a hostile universe. The Samtic emphasis on mutual obligation and conservation in their culture is writ large in the role they serve among the fair number of junior species and the occasional human polity that form the rest of the Nexus. The Samtics are not officially the leader of the Nexus, but they provide the framework and policy for the various members to communicate and record information, facilitate trade and exchange and transport with their Heighliners and so forth, and generally do so much to shape the perspective of interstellar interaction that everyone ends up doing things the Samtic way. For some, this only matters in terms of political alignment and mutual defense, but quite a few of the older members of the Nexus have even incorporated symbiotes into their physiologies. Similarly, their drive for specialization has influenced the way the Nexus fight wars, although not to the extent that USS citizens whose only impression of the Nexus is of their field forces tend to conclude: that the Nexus is some kind of rigidly organized warrior caste society. The Samtics only control such operations loosely, and the various member species' militaries have wider niches than is generally thought. Nevertheless, they do rely on each other to cover each other's backs, but don't really have a tight enough command to compel each other to do it...something that doesn't serve them all that well when they come up against forces their own size. And although the Samtics know from contact with the Myrrans how resistant to incorporation aliens can get, the singularity-level cultural output of the USS and the sheer totalizing ideology of the Bragulans blindsided them enough that they ended up being seriously burned by their initial (and overly expansive) outreach efforts.

Still, for all their laxity as weakness, the Samtic Nexus retains considerable cachet among the minor powers who would rather not fall into the orbit of the newer superpowers.
Last edited by Invictus on Wed Apr 04, 2012 7:21 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

I like these guys, they seem like a nice bunch, I love the idea of them having independently intelligent organs and I can see them as being a kind of opposite of the Myrrans, in much the same way as the Bragulans are the opposite of humans. Incidentally, is that intentional (to have two pairs of directly philosophically opposing enemies) or am I misreading things?

Oh, I have another thought on the Myrrans: Would it make sense for the lower orders of Myrran kind to have intense codes of honour and feelings of duty and proper conduct, while the higher up one goes the freer one is from these ideas, and they are quite happy about this? I mean this is pretty much as you've described them already, I just think it's an interesting idea because of how historically the idea of honour and good conduct in our societies has been linked to nobility and 'good breeding', to the extent where 'nobility' and 'class' have double meanings where they mean both social status and good conduct and 'vulgarity' means both bad conduct and lower social standing.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

speaker-to-trolls wrote:I like these guys, they seem like a nice bunch, I love the idea of them having independently intelligent organs and I can see them as being a kind of opposite of the Myrrans, in much the same way as the Bragulans are the opposite of humans. Incidentally, is that intentional (to have two pairs of directly philosophically opposing enemies) or am I misreading things?
No, it didn't start off that way. Shroom brought up the ideas of the Covenant as a meddling, ineffectual UN and a species of aquatic sophonts, and the brainstorming snowballed from there. Though I can't deny that conceptualizing the Samtics wasn't a breath of fresh air after fleshing out the Myrrans. In this sense the Samtics weren't intended to specifically oppose the Myrrans, as they were intended as more of a foil for both the USS and the Bragulans, while my impression (you'll have to ask Siege as well) is that the Myrrans were mostly conceptualized, perhaps appropriately, in an astropolitical vacuum. It's frankly quite difficult to see how the status quo we've envisioned for the Myrrans could survive contact with our main players, so for now Shroom and I have sequestered them conveniently behind the second-tier Samtic Nexus.

It's also interesting that you see the Bragulans as the opposite of humans. The Bragulan Empire is the great astropolitical nemesis of the USS, sure, but the shape of the Bragulans almost seems to me to come mostly from the system, not the people. For the other aliens, we've had their physiologies influence their societies - Zigonian gregariousness and empathy can be traced from their sensory acuity and synesthesia, the Samtic preference for unity from their colonial existence, and Myrran feudal culture from their instinctive aversion and quasi-feline nature. The Myrrans in particular are practically bizarro humans whose society only works because they're wired the other way round. In comparison, the Bragulans are folks who happen to be talking bears.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

It's also interesting that you see the Bragulans as the opposite of humans. The Bragulan Empire is the great astropolitical nemesis of the USS, sure, but the shape of the Bragulans almost seems to me to come mostly from the system, not the people. For the other aliens, we've had their physiologies influence their societies - Zigonian gregariousness and empathy can be traced from their sensory acuity and synesthesia, the Samtic preference for unity from their colonial existence, and Myrran feudal culture from their instinctive aversion and quasi-feline nature. The Myrrans in particular are practically bizarro humans whose society only works because they're wired the other way round. In comparison, the Bragulans are folks who happen to be talking bears.
I thought of the Bragulans as the opposite to humans because of two things: First, their system is just one system, rather than the thousands of different systems that humans are split into. I mean, as far as I can see out of all the races discussed so far then the humans are the most fractious and the Bragulans the most unified, all the other races discussed lie somewhere in the middle. The Zigonians have a common culture but without much in the way of government at all, the Samtics with common political ties but relying on consensus and negotiation and constant shaky compromises, and the Myrrans who barely manage to keep their political unity by carefully managing their desire to rip each other to pieces. By contrast, humanity is split into all sorts of different, disparate and totally disunited tribes, with the USS merely being the largest and most influential, and the Bragulans are a single, monolithic block, completely controlled by cosmic, constantly stamping boot of their ideology and their possibly-fictitious Emperor. In this way the Bragulans seem like an enemy not only of the Sovereignty, but of humanity as a whole, though the Sovereignty kind of embodies everything anti-Byzonic about humanity to the greatest possible degree.

I also said humanity because in the first post Shroom said he wanted this version of the BSE to be much, much bigger than the USS, so their relationship would be less USA and USSR and more the Hellenic city states and the Persian Empire. I thought it would probably be a fairer matchup to say that the Bragulans are the opposite of humanity rather than the comparatively tiny USS, if that's still the dynamic that's being put forward.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

speaker-to-trolls wrote:I thought of the Bragulans as the opposite to humans because of two things: First, their system is just one system, rather than the thousands of different systems that humans are split into. I mean, as far as I can see out of all the races discussed so far then the humans are the most fractious and the Bragulans the most unified, all the other races discussed lie somewhere in the middle. The Zigonians have a common culture but without much in the way of government at all, the Samtics with common political ties but relying on consensus and negotiation and constant shaky compromises, and the Myrrans who barely manage to keep their political unity by carefully managing their desire to rip each other to pieces. By contrast, humanity is split into all sorts of different, disparate and totally disunited tribes, with the USS merely being the largest and most influential, and the Bragulans are a single, monolithic block, completely controlled by cosmic, constantly stamping boot of their ideology and their possibly-fictitious Emperor.
Well, you aren't the first to notice this. Ford has pointed out that so far we haven't quite done much for the "monolithic aliens" problem because we're still painting them with broad brushes, but for the humans we've...actually, I can't recall any polities other the USS from the top of my head, but humanity's overall diversity has at least been brought up somewhere, I guess. But there are subtleties with the aliens too: The Zigonian mode of culture is something shaped by their history and you've got these semi-integrated populations in human polities, the mainstream cool-guys-but-still-pretty-alien Zadeth-Kaleshi guys, and the significant minority of Zigonians who refused to accept that the Loss of Zigon was their fault and are angry warrior race guys. The Samtics were not actually very social animals and a number of distinct Samtic polities exist within the Nexus, ranging from big hive-minds to almost Ferengi-like rugged collectivists. And given what we have worked out about the Myrrans, I have difficulty seeing them as any less different, disparate and totally disunited as humans, and in any case Shroom and I have a great deal of diversity in political and social organization in plan for them. The House of Mirrors, the Guilds Greater and Lesser and the Free Moons, Houses with Inquisitorial or Hedonistic leanings, heretics who reject the Queen on her Throne...

As for the Bragulans, you're completely correct. Only Shroom knows what goes on inside the Empire. Of course if you're labeling them as opposites based on their territorial ambitions, they're everyone's opposites. Everything else within the Korpulu Sector has reason to oppose them.

As for the whole diversity problem: it's always difficult to distinguish aliens from humans without pigeonholing them, just like it's difficult to remove ourselves from our own human baseline perspective. Nevertheless, you can't really distinguish the aliens without creating a set of characteristics that make them different from humans and then use them as a baseline to see how they think and act. I think we're still at this stage. Of course, having a set of common characteristics does not preclude the aliens from having cultural and political diversity, but the latter must be built on top of the former.

Also on Myrran reproduction: Cats go into heat, right? Maybe so do Myrrans. Which means that for a brief period every cycle they get the unfamiliar and overriding urge to fuck someone, and you can imagine how annoying this would be if you're a sapient, rational being who doesn't even like people. Nevertheless, Myrrans pragmatically recognize the need to perpetuate the species and do their best to account for it. In the cramped Myrran cities, you get a few weeks every year when the normally cold, formal and regimented society breaks down and suddenly it's Saturnalia up in this motherfucker. Nobles who can afford to pass on their DNA in other, more technologically advanced ways however may opt to spay themselves so they wouldn't have to suffer through these undignified urges.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Siege »

I'd say that for the Myrrans at least, each House might officially be a feudal barony with a figurehead-empress at the top, but with all their customized coping mechanisms they could just as well be nations unto themselves.

There's also something to be said for not making the human idea of the nation-state into a universally applicable phenomenon. Beings like Samtics and Myrrans might not even understand the human concept of political legitimacy.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

All the discussion for SOTSS seems to be happening on MSN lately so let's liven this thread up a bit.

The USS uses replicant soldiers to fight its wars we know, but how do the Bragulans get their overwhelming numbers? Do they do something similar?
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

hmmmm

Aside from an already huge population to obtain conscripts and volunteers from in the normal fashion...

Entire armies in cryo-hibernation to be thawed out in case of war?

Whole worlds that are basically barrackses, with populations that are born and grow old and die in perpetual military service?

And in normal worlds, if need be, any citizen can be sent to serve in the military?
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Ford Prefect »

I think how the Bragulans make war has a lot to do with how clever they're supposed to be about all the oppression. Does the system just want a whole lot of Bragulans to march into the jaws of battle, or does it want to beat other nations? In the later case then yeah, I can see them forming social blocs which exist to funnel meat into the proverbial grinder, but if it's the latter you'd think they'd bend their population and industry to something cleverer.

On the other hand they are also less technologically advanced, so that might limit their options.
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