That's the whole point, though, they're immoral. They don't care what gets in their way to achieve their goal. They mobilize all the resource they can, on a much bigger scale than all these characters are, because that's what they're meant to be. An immoral faction that lacks empathy, with many more resources than a single person. Your situation shows more recklessness and rage than it shows calculated immorality. I'm proposing a sound enemy, who will bother colonies on a greater scale, believing in its ideals. The faction wasn't created around the idea of offending as many people as I could either, it was always part of King's character to feel like a lot of people were worthless, and if he had the chance to seize it, he'd do what I'm doing right now. I wouldn't have acted upon that if there was an actual problematic colony/faction that was creating some interesting situations. There isn't, right now. Reguarding it being over the top, I feel like it's the other way around. It's very plain and simple, they're not sacrificing people by the millions to the lord of deaths, they're enslaving people for them to work to a goal, improving both the means of slavery and their own situation. Characters on their own, who claim to be evil or have evil intents usually are more over the top. Your own character Sen, got banned from Tetanus Fields because you were repeatedly shooting a glass ceiling with a rocket launcher to show a flaw in local laws. A faction that uses slavery to generate labour force isn't over the top, in my opinion.
Confirmed Astral Empire is less evil than Russia under Stalin. At least the people being randomly killed are being used for science, though otherwise Luminaria is pretty much Russia.
This would be my particular word of warning, and in part the reason I decided to create a faction that was nice nice on the surface for my plans to create a faction for evil players. Here in particular is what you're going to run into: If you are a public colony, you are going to be constantly bombarded by one off goodguys deciding to defeat you to prove they are just and right and a badass. If you're a private colony you're going to have no foot traffic whatsoever and your people are just going to go elsewhere and only show up for particular events. Secondly, you're going to inevitably fall victim to the 'not to a player character' moral logic that unfortunately plagues these games. You can kill, enslave, and otherwise maim, wreak havoc on, and destroy the lives of as many bystanders, landstanders, and other NPC's and no one will bat an eye, and neither will they really care. The moment you do something to a player character though, most people will not be able to stomach the fact that your character is actually evil and will form massive lynch mobs basically to track to down and kill you. You may even find your own faction will not support your evil action, even if they didn't care previously about your actions before when they weren't hurting player character. Thirdly, you're going to run into the conflict between the Just World Fallacy and your own desire to win. In narratives evil always loses in the end, it plays by the just world fallacy, and there's a reason that even when an artiste director goes and makes a movie where the bad guy wins the screening audience rejects it and sends it back for a reshoot. People like to believe the world is just and that evil loses. Narratives should naturally follow this curve of audience expectation, even if it isn't true in the real world. Ultimately though, when you are the villian and your defeat isn't written into the script from the get go, you're going to run into people forming their lynch mobs and then getting upset when you don't throw yourself on their sword, because hell, who wants to lose? That said, conflict is what makes roleplaying interesting. Sitting around bars and asking about backstories is boring. If you're okay with the idea that your faction will inevitably fall for not treading the line of civility and evil, then go right ahead, I imagine it will be very interesting to watch and I might even engage in it. Otherwise it's just going to be a drama bomb waiting to happen.
I vote yes on this one. It seems to be good idea, because my character in the USCM gets barely any action RP. All I gets is maybe a spot on a small planetary patrol of the freezer base. It would give the USCM a bigger chance of having action go on.
You gotta get more active, in the past week we hit a crash site, a lab and a pirate operated space station.
I love this idea as well and as a newcomer I was thinking what did the USCM get to fight against? And had similar ideas to this "evil empire". I would love to participate as a evil servant to one of the rich royals.
Great, always looking for more! Send me an OOC inbox message with infos about your characters so we can see where they'll fit in!
Curious. I don't recall any USCM bill payments on the Honeydew Prior master ledger. I never recalled paying anything to USSEC for reinstating us as a fully fledged colony. You have your sources mixed up.
Was that.. me? Well Sanguine anyways, well he's a stupid som' bitch who actually doesn't care because he doesn't see the worthfullness of a life. He's just a real dumb-dumb
You have to expect lawlessness in an inter-galactic frontier such as this one. People will always come out of the wood-work and try to disrupt the business of other people, whether it is fore more simplistic selfish gain, or it is large acts of destruction. What we are talking about here is degrees of Evil, and moreso, as far as I can see, Alignment. Lawful Evil. Neutral Good. Chaotic Neutral. etc. Its the difference between the bandits and outlaws on the country-side, and the neighboring monarchy who wont think twice about enslaving an entire population of people. Those bandits and outlaws could have any number of motives and motivations (self for self? murder vs non-lethal? angry reactionary?), and while some will band, most are a mess of decentralized individuals who just aren't interested in adhering to the local laws. Moreso, it is more the byproduct of the lack of a more reliable and more present law-enforcement structure if anything. On the other end, you have a totalitarian monarchy run by a King and a faction that could deliberately care less about the whims and well-being of an entire throng of people (slaves), and that, with the illusion of social responsibility intact, allows for immoral experimentation and abuse. Black grit underneath white gloves. ... You will no doubt see varying degrees of evil there. The neighbor down the street who stole the stereo out of your truck VS the government of North Korea.
There already seem to be a few people I've come across that may be interested in becoming Slavers, and some interested in buying slaves for that matter. Since I've successfully been sold on this idea, I've taken the liberty to stimulate some discussion: http://community.playstarboundrp.com/threads/news-slavers-are-on-the-rise.2755/#post-29748
This certainly looks interesting. Really tempted to get my own character involved in this, actually. She's currently indecisive about where to settle down and have a home, and, in all her naive-ness, the kind-hearted Floran could end up settling down in the immoral empire that plays itself off as the perfect society. Although, I'm quite not sure how to go about with the whole slavery thing. Mind you, it's a really interesting idea, but my character is really naive and probably wouldn't know what it was, so Idk how she'd go about reacting to that. What do you think?
Try to think about it from a non-human standpoint. It doesn't mean you're evil. It doesn't mean you're a bad person yourself. The universe is used to slavery. Corporate slavery on earth and sex-worker slavery isn't on your mind 24/7 and it's something really outrageous and that's part of our society of today. Slavery IS a common thing on earth, in 2014, we just happen to be extremely sheltered from it. There are people forced to work into corporations. There are people forced to work into prostitution. And this is something we have to live with. The Astral Empire doesn't hide its slavery, and grants the chance to its slaves to become a member of society when they're deemed worthy of it by the higher society. It's not the worst kind of slavery that exists. It's one Florans are used to. It's one Florans would think as weak, because some Florans tribes probably treat slaves like absolute worthless garbage. See my post on BIGtheRED's thread about slavery to understand my point about slavery. We're in a gigantic universe with all kinds of societies. It's not uncommon, and the Astral Empire does it """"gently""""", with a purpose beyond pure profit. If you set aside the extremely problematic way we build our army, all that is part of our empire, aka the experiments, the slavery, the corruption, the undercover tortures, the political pressure we try to put on, etc. This is all common stuff on earth, nowadays. Because this is a RP, and because starbound is a light-hearted game, people will set aside gritty realism and all the cynicism that comes with it, but The Astral Empire in itself (that one army building thing aside) is no worse morally and ethically than countries like Russia, the USA or Japan. For a machine like society to work, there's always a lot of suffering. Places like honeydew prior are viable, as they are peaceful little happy-farmer community, but something like Avalon or the USCM has to come with this kind of stuff. No capitalistic society or organization prospers without a large number of actors consumed, as sad as it is.
This. This. This. At the very least, things can get stale. New ideas if they succeed or fail, still bring variety, and throw something new into the mix. Maybe a faction changes how it does business or hell I dunno. PC's get affected in some way. It adds more to the mix then the same old same old, handful of factions doing stuff on their lonesome, or a gaggle flocking to a bar.
