Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

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Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Enough dicking around with TEO, time to go back to the homeland, the mainland, back in the USS-OZ.

Siege and I had a good run there, and a great part of it involved rekindling old OZ classics in the principle actors of old old old ridiculously old SOTS - the Sovereignty, the Brags, the Karlacks, the Apexai, and the likes of John Baylor, the Duke of Death, Isabella Noguiera, the eminent Ceasar Jorge Motonow, Doctor Wesley Prefect Birkin, and all the other great stuff. It was remarkable how these old works, contributed by the old veterans, not just yours truly but also including Siege himself, Arty, Peregrin and so many others, have held up so well due to the good spirit in which they were made. It was great seeing these things again. Some of them, I wrote when I was just a wee teen, and yet! They still make me smile. Touching these old roots was a wonderful experience. I almost forgot how wonderful worldbuilding was. Flexing the old worldbuilding mojo, beholding our works, man.

Siege and I have pondered on resurrecting Sovereigns of the Stars with gusto, taking the old concepts, putting this revolution into overdrive, going to places that we've touched in the past but now without the boundaries or limits imposed on us by circumstances, and with widened perspectives and horizons that comes with the years, as well as incorporating new things and ideas that we've encountered into the old faithful 'verse.

Changing it entirely.

Recent exploits in examining fiction, art, sci-fi, analyzing themes and symbolisms, might give us new ideas on how to pursue this and breathe new life into the old. One of the things that I loved most, and still love most, about the old 'verse was how alive it was. Despite the amateurish attempt to write sci-fi military stuff, outside of that we were able to imbibe into the 'verse a very weird idiosyncratic loony sense of life - it was alive, with all the paradoxes and weirdness and insanities that comes with it. One of the best things, I think upon reflecting back on it, was how we probably spent more time trying to figure out what kind of hedonistic debaucheries, fine delicacies, and moronic entertainment the peoples and cultures of the SOTSverse indulged in rather than concentrating on technobabbulations and weapons yields and joules (although it was still there, but thankfully we never turned ourselves into human calculators but instead reveled in all the crazy shit and laughed). We have Peregrin to thank for that.

I have to say that PREGRIN was right. He was so very right. And so very before his time. His ideas of pushing the boundaries, of indulging in the weird and the strange, are something I've grown quite fond of and have been pondering for a while. It was a profound influence. I'd love to have him back on this. This is for you, mang.

Old SOTS was about taking a picture of the modern day with all its flaws, all its ugliness, all its wonders and glories, and transpositioning it into the future. It was an old and semi-conscious attempt at depicting the human condition, from our then-limited understanding of it, and how that condition, how that humanity and humanness, is both unchanging throughout the ages, so same, and yet so dynamic and ever changing and evolving.

Well, actually a lot of it was just going "oh this looks cool and/or stupid, let's put it in the blender!". Most of it, actually. Yeah. The sense of humor was one of the best parts. :mrgreen:

So anyway, I think we're going to be making some revisions in the old baby. And this thread is for figuring out and discussing and maybe ultimately article-ating the results of that.

And lastly, it's good to be back. I missed you guys.

Everyone's invited to partake in this thread and the eventual madness we'll hopefully excrete from the loins of our imaginations.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Ford Prefect »

I'd really love to see Sovereigns of the Stars revisited. Looking back on it now, I think there was a remarkable strength to it. Not necessarily because it was weird, though it was in its own a glitzy, grimy parody of real life, but because it had things in it which really only existed to give it flavour. Monotow's Star Wars, VaticanBurger, that sort of thing. We've all come a long way since those heady days of our youth, and I think that you've come past your flirtation with the obscene, Shroomy. That sounds, uh, a little ambiguous, but what I mean to say is that it's the right time for SotS to come back. When you first proposed Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, I felt you were losing its intrinsic charm in favour of weirdness for weirdness' sake, but seeing you discuss science fiction recently I've been really impressed.

Let's go, together. :v
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Heretic »

What the heck is TEO?

Anyway, I don't remember too much about it but I do recall that the dickery and hilariousness of it long ago, and I believe that influenced me. Would be cool to see it happen again.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

IDEAS

Part of what I'm toying in my head now, based on experiences from TEO (specifically SDNW4), is the formulation of the nations and factions of SOTS. Like I told Fingolfin, we shouldn't lift everything we had from there, but rather take the best ideas we had and ditch the rest of the unnecessary baggage to make something new and better. Siege and I (mostly Siege) developed some good material for the SDNW4 game, with the old old SOTS as a basis but radically altered and modified and evolved and accelerated. We should incorporate a lot of that, and stuff.

Anyway, formulation of human nations and factions.

Back in old SOTS you've got the United Sovereignty of Earth (America Fuck Yeah in space), the Terran Colonial Coalition (redneck America in space), and the League of Free Worlds (pseudo-Europe in space), and that was it. It was something I made when I was young. Let's break it down and change it for the better.

In SDNW4 Siege brilliantly transformed it into the United Solarian Sovereignty, barely anything like the old USE and more totally into a deep end cyberpunk transhuman gritty idiosyncratic confident materialistic debauched hyper-capitalist obscene insane nation ran by AIs, posthumans, replicants, megacorporations and cutting edge trans-singularity technology.

I loved it. We should totally keep it. The Sovereignty was extremely dynamic and glourious and just nuts.

The Sovereignty, as I envisioned it back then, was always the "actor" of the movie and in this case, so it shall be too.

It's a reflection of humanity, the limitless potential it is capable of actualizing (in the dazzling ultra-urbanized megapoli spanning Solaris, and the cyberscapes of the Datasphere), as well as all the baseness of man still present even in the far future, for ill (in the form of unrestrained greed, rampant violence, pornography, technologically-enhanced vices, etc.) and for good (yeah trust me on this :P ).

The other human nations always thought that the Sovereignty was full of ultra-tech degenerates. :D

So I'm thinking that to actualize this 'verse and make it more alive, the various other nations that surround the USS should reflect parts of it, or reflect other aspects of humanity, or have some sort of resonant theme to them as well rather than be just hollow stereotypes or something. They should be... more than just what they are.

Ditch the TCC and the LFW.

There should be quite many other human factions and nations, large and small, surrounding the USS. For some reason or another, they can be at varying stages of development, different and unique in their own way. Earth would be gone by now, would have been gone for a long while (destroyed? shrunk into insignificance, like how the birthplace of homo sapiens today is not the center of all humanity but is just some forgotten jungle somewhere? or some vestigial atrophied nation? sure, why not), because the universe of SOTS Supreme would be very far from the casual frame of reference of normal militarist science fiction with its US MAREENS IN SPESS HUT HUT HUT (which ironically was what original SOTS was). This is to allow for an anything goes mindset, because in this universe, anything will go.

Instead of the TCC and the LFW, the many nations and factions, big and small, around the USS can be old and new. Some can be the balkanized remains of once great nations. Others can be decaying empires striving for relevancy and with delusions of having retained their former standing. There can be those trying to replicate the ways of Old Earth, emulating how in other science fictions despite being in the far future it's still a bunch of representative democracies in space, with a United States Marine Corps in space, waging the Vietnam War in space.

The USS will have strength, confidence and swagger that few can match. It's one of the bigger actors, but not necessarily the biggest. For those familiar with old SOTS background, the USS will have achieved great technological achievements due to sheltering Exodite Apexai fleeing from the menacing Bragulan Star Empire - this promethean gift is what gives the USS its edge, and is the envy of many other human and inhuman nations.

In SDNW4, this Apexai legacy (along with the strains of the First Bragulan War) is what propelled the USS to its breakneck pace of development. Apexai Hybridization Programs resulted in hybrid psions too, furthering not only the technological, but also the biological and mentallic, development of the Sovereignty.

The USS can have peers too. There will be intact nations that can equal it, or other strange reclusive humans who've gone to the far edges of the Nine Vectors of the Known Universe and have achieved technological masteries by their own hands. Factions that gain power through trade, through diplomacy. Through a myriad other means. The Soveriegnty is just one nation, at the heart of so many other human powers all striving and vying and struggling to exist.

All of them can reflect bits of humanity.

And part of the theme can be how the diversity of humankind represented in these squabbling powers, great and small, are surrounded by a much greater, vaster, magnificent and terrific universe that is far larger in size than any of us.

This can be represented by the strange aliens that surround the pockets of humanity.

We revisit SOTS' old aliens. The aggressive tyrannical ursine Bragulans, the laid-back pleasant reptilian Zigonians, the enigmatic Karlacks, and the unbearably obnoxious yet undeniably advanced grey Apexai.


To be continued. I am tired of ranting ATM.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Heretic wrote:What the heck is TEO?

Anyway, I don't remember too much about it but I do recall that the dickery and hilariousness of it long ago, and I believe that influenced me. Would be cool to see it happen again.
TEO = SDN



Anyway.

We revisit SOTS' old aliens. The aggressive tyrannical ursine Bragulans, the laid-back pleasant reptilian Zigonians, the enigmatic Karlacks, and the unbearably obnoxious yet undeniably advanced grey Apexai.

They surround the human worlds, already vibrantand diverse in their own ways, to contrast the human condition with that of things that are truly vast and alien (or as alien as we can be).

The Bragulans in this incarnation will be an enormous empire, no longer second string catching up with the USE as in old SOTS. They will be a Glourious Star Empire of Bragule and under the great regime of their Imperator Darvyl Sagatantron Byzon I, they will have conquered thousands of star systems, dwarfing the USS and other humans in sheer size. The Empire is ultra-militarized, its populace cowed under the precepts of Byzonism, a potent form of alien totalitarianism emphasizing the annihilation of the concept of self, replacing it with conformity and the empowerment of the group to achieve true unity and power power - out of many, one - and in that unison they form Bragule, Bragulanity, and ultimately Byzon. The scope of the regime is that it can wage a dozen interstellar wars at the peripheries of its territories without even flinching, where typographical errors can result in the condemnation of star systems, it is truly a mindless mass of conformism and oppression and destruction and industrialization and militarization. No one even knows if Byzon is still alive. The entire nation is at war footing. And should it marshal all its forces to destroy a threat, then woe be to the countless billions that will be put to the atomic flame.

This uniform mass of desolation, thousands of acid-drench polluted worlds, continents encroached by great factories the size of mountain ranges, skies blotted out by acrid smoke belched forth by a million thermonuclear furnaces drowning the oceans with their waste, is but one of the many forces man has to reckon with. It has destroyed entire races in the past, it is destroying them in the present, and it will continue to destroy in the centuries to come.

It is the ultimate expression of tyranny.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Ford Prefect »

Byzon was always an element of the universe I liked. I mean obviously he was Stalin, but I think that obvious parallel really worked because it gave the Bragulans a character beyond just being angry bears. There was this reflection of the USSR in the 60s: a monolithic regime at odds with its enemies with a paranoid madman at its head, but there was stirring progandic spy fiction and ordinary bears at the heart of it.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Yes. Under the veneer of totalitarianism and militarism, the Bragulans have always been capable of subterfuge in the Imperial Bureau of Galactic Vigilance, the IBGV, which was their version of the KGB and NKVD.

Despite the indoctrination, the propaganda, the doublethink, the Brags have always been ruthlessly pragmatic.

And the faceless conformism of the Bragulan society, the destruction of individual identity, can also make the moments of normalcy - of ordinary bears, of mama Olgya Bearbushka coming home to her cubs - all the more precious. D'awww.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Booboo Flem says
I was thinking of creating an admech faction for SOTS-S though
but something different
like the technotheocracy
guys who sequester themselves and pursue divine science
for truly understanding the universe
and perhaps they indirectly own a bunch of worlds that are little than feifs, they don't give a shit about the people there, just the resources
so they give the people some tech, make them think they're hot shit, in exchange for allowing some techno-techno mining-temple and some warm bodies to be acolytes


Dylan Richards says
You've gotta ask yourself 'what role does religion play in the USS'


Booboo Flem says
in the USS itself?
oh, the admech-thing can be its own nation


Dylan Richards says
Stuff like the Technotheocracy, the Adeptus MEchanicus, that doesn't really make a lot of sense.


Booboo Flem says
in the USS itself, religion can be anything
the Technotheocracy can be its own faction off far away
which the USS may have dealings with
when the Karlacks come trying to eat people


Booboo Flem says
the Technos aren't in the USS


Booboo Flem says
and are probably regarded by the Solarians as nuts


Dylan Richards says
i think what I mean dude


Dylan Richards says
It's like you're trying to build a holisitic picture of the universe, yeah? And so the things you have are elements of that picture. But what does the Order of the Techno Priests actually say?


Booboo Flem says
ah yes
Strak related this to me in PM
less of "what ideas do you have for the verse"
and more...
what role should these things place
if the worldbuilding exercise was a movie
then what would this scene signify


Dylan Richards says
Yeah, that's what I mean.


Booboo Flem says
yeah, it's tough


Dylan Richards says
that's why I want to caution you about just going wild and adding lots of crazy shit.


Booboo Flem says
cause sometimes it's just "ooh this looks cool"


Dylan Richards says
I mean obviously you had crazy shit in the past, but a lot of it really brought out that celebrity-obsessesed corporate-controlled consumer culture that the USE had


Booboo Flem says
they could be guys who wanted to find truth
but became a bunch of blinded dogmatic techno-worshiping asses
and instead of discovering wonders
they end up dissecting shit in a morgue instead
dehumanized
hmmm
which was something I think I touched on
Siege and I were musing
how these Technopriests would be studying the Karlacks
trying to experiment on this tiny Pandora-like world
dissecting shit
mutating shit
when it turns out this tiny Pandora world was just a vestigial organ
of an interstellar-spanning Karlack hivemind brood
so these scientists that tried to put the thing in a bottle
end up encountering a much larger greater vaster incomprehensible force of nature
that fucks them up


Dylan Richards says
Man that could actually lead to bringing the Karlacks into some sort of conflict


Booboo Flem says
the Karlacks won't be malicious. they're more of a naturalistic processes
that doesn't give a fuck about conscience or morals or anything
so the natural reaction of any organism or ecosystem-organism to an intrusion
is to fuck it up


Dylan Richards says
I will suggest that if you follow through on this technopriest thing
Please don't ape the Catholic Church. THat's so old lol


Booboo Flem says
this techno-stuff is difficult to do
even back in Comix
hence we're gonna throw ideas around
hmmm...
they can be a metaphor for the categorizing mindset
the quantificatory mindset
that is desensitized from wonder
they fashion themselves to be the Smartest Faction in the SOTSverse


Dylan Richards says
So long as you think it serves to make SotS a more interesting place.


Booboo Flem says
sequester themselves in their gleaming temple ships
just throwing ideas around
cause the mindset
is something you encounter a lot
another angle of conformity and mental-concentration campness
so it doesn't have to be all "techno-religion"


Dylan Richards says
Mental conformity is good.
Maybe less religious, maybe more 'logical, regimented society'


Booboo Flem says
we'll have to figure out how it should be presented
these guys should be way more dehumanized
possibly represented via their cyberization
but its odd, since in the USS people are also heavily augmented
so its not the augments that dehumanize
but their applications
the purpose of these enhancements
determine the effects on the human



Dylan Richards says
The USS uses its enhancements for pleasure
The return of the USE's consumer culture.


Booboo Flem says
exactly
your favorite iKidneys
for pleasure, for sensation, for a dysfunctional but fundamentally human society
whereas these Technos use it to de-humanize themselves
perhaps deliberately
ala how the AdMech in 40k also disdains fleshy shits
a scientific regimented mindset could disdain the subjectivity of the human condition



Dylan Richards says
Eliminating human emotion and natural response, whereas the USS serves to enhance it.


Booboo Flem says
and so their "religion" would be to turn themselves from human, into non-human non-subjective... living instruments
living scientific instruments
for their pursuit of knowledge
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Dylan Richards says
USS commentators might be all 'pfft what a crazy religion'
And they adjust their ppocket protectors and say 'it's not a religion it's rationality'


Booboo Flem says
theological matters!
yes
perhaps the appearance of theocracy stuff
is the USS perception
they call them technopriests
but the technos really don't care
what these meatbags say
and think their indulgence of fleshy subjectve pleasures is terrible
squandering the blessings of the omnissiah pursuit of knowledge
in such base ways
this makes them so lacking in compassion
and...
hmmm
what if those worlds whose people they rule
are just subjects of some social experiment
?
partly because some twisted techno wishes to reinforce his notions of "how better we are"
and so they construct these societies on their planets that are all feudal
with ignorant people worshipping these technopriests?


Dylan Richards says
I dont' think you should go down that route.
You really need to avoid all 'throwback' things, I think.
Like social experiment = awesome.
I think it might be best to go with an alien abduction motif.


Booboo Flem says
stealing individuals?


Dylan Richards says
Yeah.
leaving messages and shit.


Booboo Flem says
hmmm
how about stealing communities?
cities?
nah


Dylan Richards says
Think less mad science and more 'real experimental science done by dickheads'


Booboo Flem says
stanford prison experiment
hmmm...
mutilating people and cyberizing them?
hmm
but how about manipulating societies?
they can call it an experiment


Dylan Richards says
Yeah, manipulation is best.


Booboo Flem says
but in reality they're just giving techno-gear to some despot asshole on some planet


Dylan Richards says
Leaving trinkets and observing how society changes as a result.


Booboo Flem says
and doing what everyone else is doing
yes
and the experiment devolves into the same exercise of propping regimes
but the technos are arrogant
and think they're hot shit
when it's just so petty and base and shitty really
and so, in the end, they're no different from everyone, for all their high and mighty bullshit
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Siege »

Hell, it's about time.

Finally it's here! This should be glorious.

And if I may quote my own thoughts for a moment:

I think the technos could be, in a sense, lost in its mission of understanding the universe. So obsessed with their frankly rather arbitrary goals that they've lost sight of their own humanity. They might completely fail to understand the reasons why nations like the USS or the Brags do what they do, even when those reasons are as simple as "we don't wanna die". They lost their humanity when they lost sight of key concepts that define human life like pain, love, death. If they started out with some basic ideals like understanding the universe and bettering it, possibly they've taken it to the point where taking the human aesthetic, crudely forged by mother nature's evolutionary whims, and making it 'better' (for given values of 'better' anyway) has become a goal of itself, and no longer serves any real purpose beyond just doing it because they can.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Invictus »

It begins, the great revival!

I have my own take on the technotheocracy: as Cold Warrior types vanished up their own wormhole buses. If the USS achieved their current splendor through happy incorporation of the Apexai and their hyper-technology, these bunch are the ones who never really trusted the aliens and preferred to blaze their own path to technological supremacy among the aliens - human supremacists at heart, despite the inhuman monsters they themselves have become (And not strawman redneck caricatures). As they started off as some kind of vast military-scientific complex that budded off the USS itself, their operations would have shrouded in conspiracy and obscurity (handily allowing for a few links with CEID, no?), but eventually would have shaped their very natures into something that is no longer comprehensible to mainstream humanity. They are the think tank gone rampant: their fervid experimentation driven by no longer rational blueprints and operational tempos, their behavior alternately constrained by thousand-year rules and directives they cannot ignore, or lost all semblance of restraint a long time ago, occasionally depopulating a world or unleashing robot legions or something. They definitely don't see themselves as a religion, but the only people in the galaxy who are Hard enough to do Hard Things, and nobody else can do What Needs To Be Done, including the humanity they have originally devoted themselves to protecting.

EDIT: Oh derp I just described the HUMANITY FUCK YEAH milwankers again, didn't I.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

That would be intriguing, yes. Their very actions, as insane as they can be, are dictated by mantras encoded into their very genomes and beings. What they do is as much as what they want to do as what they must do.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Fingolfin »

Can I join with my bunch of stark raving religious exterminatus maniacs? :mrgreen:
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Ford Prefect »

That would be somewhat missing the point, Fin.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Fingolfin »

Ford Prefect wrote:That would be somewhat missing the point, Fin.
I don't exactly intend to play it as an exact Warhammer 40k copy.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by speaker-to-trolls »

Awesome, I loved Siege and Shroom's stuff on SDNW4, especially the way Siege developed the Sovreignty into a very different kind of nation than it had originally been, with many flaws and many great qualities and generally being completely different to any kind of modern Republic transplanted into space. I also loved seeing the Bragulans, the Bragulans are fun for everyone.

To Shroom: Do you plan on making the Bragulans more serious in this iteration? I mean they always had their serious and their humorous side depending on how you wrote them, but they were essentially a kind of charicature of Stalinist Russia (or the western idea of Stalinist Russia). Your description in this thread makes them sound more Orwellian, a huge, faceless machine of a society crushing all resistance inside and outside (though in reality that might be more how they want to be perceived than how they really are), does this mean we'll see less humour and more boots stamping on Bragulan faces from here?

To Fingolfin: I think Ford isn't so much worrying about you making a 40K knockoff, but more that the whole idea of a society that's defined as being crazy religious fanatics is kind of easy and one-note, whereas this thread was started with the idea of making things more nuanced while keeping them over the top and fantastical.

Which is hard, which is why I haven't posted any ideas of my own :)
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Magister Militum »

I also loved the colorful diversity of the USS in SDNW4, and seeing SotS reborn would be a great joy. The idea of a more nuanced and yet fantastical version of SotS, however, is what intrigues me the most, as it has the potential for some great world building.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

speaker-to-trolls wrote:To Shroom: Do you plan on making the Bragulans more serious in this iteration? I mean they always had their serious and their humorous side depending on how you wrote them, but they were essentially a kind of charicature of Stalinist Russia (or the western idea of Stalinist Russia). Your description in this thread makes them sound more Orwellian, a huge, faceless machine of a society crushing all resistance inside and outside (though in reality that might be more how they want to be perceived than how they really are), does this mean we'll see less humour and more boots stamping on Bragulan faces from here?
Well, I think I might be cutting down on the poo jokes, but I'm not going to be above making humor of the totalitarian system, the obtuse naming conventions, the callous brutality and crassness and dickery of the Bragulans in general in their face-stomping, the deranged levels of Byzonistic leader-worship and the like. Dropping moons on people's homeworlds and then fucking laughing at it is an innate part of who they are. :)

Making them more Orwellian involves enlarging the scale of their totalitarianism and making them just huge. I think the Brags would work better in SOTS Supreme as a great and looming threat that shadows the nations around it and has the capacity to bury them, rather than in SDNW4 and in old SOTS where there was rough parity between it and the USS/USE like in the real life Cold War with the Russians always playing second fiddle to the Americans. Making the foolish human shits very uncomfortable whenever the enormous Bragulan bear grumbles is more effective.

I guess this comes from a dissatisfaction of how in previous SOTS, the Brags while always tyrannical and such, were still... contained and still didn't seem to do much. It was stale. This is an attempt at making them more formidable, and would be balanced by the addition of more human nations. The united lock and step faceless front of oppression makes the Brags also a contrast to the numerous and diverse and disunited nations of humanity, where their disunity and penchant for fucking each other up is their greatest weakness, yet their diversity and multiculturality is also what makes them "better" (or at least less-horrible) places to be in than Bragule.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Czernobog »

Man, this makes me want to make my own sci-fi universe designed along much the same principles.
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Order. Unity. Obedience.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Booted Vulture »

That's because you're a hack.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Mobius 1 »

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On a more serious note, I wanted to ask about JOHN BAYLOR PRIME.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

What about ole Baylor?

In Siege's USS in SDNW4 he was a Jack O'Neill-ish Replicant Marine with quirks. It was a pretty good incarnation too. Battling nanovirus-infested Michael Jackson deadite zombie hordes. :lol:
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Mobius 1 »

wat. I guess I was always saw JBP as the 'archetypical' SOTS character, the point from which to show average viewpoint examples of SOTS, so yeah, that's wat.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

there was an arc in sdnw4 that siege and i had difficulty finishing so we ended up going fuck this and turning the climax into a musical set to Thriller



Replicant Baylor is still a pretty average joe. Selphie is a special forces chick in a giant ultratech piece of power armor goodness.

Anyway, in SOTS Supreme's enhanced USS, cyberpunky stuff and rampant consumerism is so off the charts that not only do people routinely have corporate-branded products in their organ systems, but there are entire populations of people who are also corporate-manufactured, i.e. a large portion of military service members are actually fabricated people.

Now you could say that this takes away the averageness of the Baylors of the universe. I would have agreed with you too. Especially back in the days when I perceived the USE as simply America in Space and didn't really care much for these weird ass high concepts.

But maybe this can be part of the USS' themes. Is it any less real if it was vat grown in a laboratory, and every cell in its body is stamped by a corporate logo? You've got these mass produced grunts who are all blue collar and down to earth and have hopes and dreams and aspirations. Are they any less human just because they were hatched from a tube?

It also has a weird thing to it. Blue collar worker-class, themselves being made in factories. Soldiers trained to use advanced weapons and technologies, and themselves also produced by space Lockheed-Martin.

Special forces people, like Selphie, could be bio-genomic hot-rods super customized for extreme operations and with the best modifications.

Likewise, the rich and famous would also be able to reconstitute themselves using the most expensive organelles available in the market.

Yet in using these biotechs to make themselves so more than human, so beyond human and post/trans-human and all that, their purpose in having these post-organs and stuff, to pursue more pleasures or live their lives more radically XTREMELY and groovily, conversely still makes them fundamentally so very much human for better or worse.

This is in stark contrast to the dehumanized techno-technos we discussed a few posts ago.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Ford Prefect »

At first this didn't really appeal to me, but now that I think about it, I kind of like it. I mean what's core is Baylor and Selphie's personalities (and also the aloha shirt/yellow sun dress +cowboy boots), and if being artificial people feeds into those personalities, it works for me.
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Re: Sovereigns of the Stars Supreme, revisited

Post by Shroom Man 777 »

Would them being artificial make their actions and behaviors less real? I think Baylor's personality would be pretty much independent on whether or not he was born in a tube or not. His quirkiness and weird sense of humor could be some kind of reaction towards his origins as a Replicant. But I think despite the connotations of being mass-produced, I think the Replicants generally will be pretty well-adjusted and normal people. Precisely because "normal" is a very subjective thing in the USS.

It would be odd if a Replicant Marine would be more relatable to us, 21st century readers, than the average citizen of the USS whose brains is all surfing the Datasphere and bombarded by consumerism/materialism-promoting memetic advertisements and extrasensory enhanced reality simulation stimulations and such. Thinking about it, the Replicant would be more "average" to us if we look at it that way.

I am not sure if Selphie was also a purposely-manufactured special ops Replicant, or if she was some rich kid who wanted action and so bought herself some SinTek mods and joined the Para-Marines.
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