this is one of my PCs: a species of alien parasites trapped on Earth who have a religious bar on parasitizing sentients, so contract with the Empire for clone bodies.
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Wait I thought humans had only made contact with one alien species (the Foreigners?)
aug 29, 2025, 3:31 am • 1 0 • view
only one other species of starfarers! there are maybe a dozen other species who were tributaries of the Empire, only a couple of which have populations on Earth.
aug 29, 2025, 4:57 am • 3 0 • view
this is why the Empire's diplomatic corps is the Institute for Nonstandard Environments, which used to provide life support for nonhuman dignitaries and reports up through the Bureau of the Rod. (the Empire maintains a legal fiction that it is the sole legitimate human polity.)
aug 29, 2025, 4:59 am • 3 0 • view
Ohhhh so we just uplifted them or something
aug 29, 2025, 6:28 am • 0 0 • view
That’s very cool! I had kind of the opposite idea when I was thinking about what the cosmology of a sentient parasite would be: they’d see themselves as souls.
aug 29, 2025, 3:14 am • 15 0 • view
Interesting - I feel like that's the dynamic of Trek's trills? Though that's nominally symbiosis
aug 29, 2025, 3:29 am • 0 0 • view
Sort of separate note: is the empire human (or post-human)? Like are the emperor and the ruling classes baseline humans and the post humans lower orders? Or the opposite, are they the most removed from humanity?
aug 29, 2025, 3:16 am • 6 0 • view
the largest single caste of humans are near-baselines, who have relatively few admixtures from genetically engineered persons and who are mostly humans. the most _human-appearing_ people are the highborn castes, who have had a selection of more or less uniformly positive traits applied.
aug 29, 2025, 3:18 am • 8 0 • view
then there are labor castes, who are engineered (mostly) to be large, dumb, and compliant. there are warbred castes, who are very dangerous in individual combat but have very short lifespans. there are semi-sentients like Mutterers and the Sickly. then there are the Technical Castes.
aug 29, 2025, 3:19 am • 7 0 • view
immediately before the Interdict came down, there was a civil war started by the Technical Castes over the testament of the Eighth Oracle. the Emperor released a plague which sterilized them, and the Creche Bureau created the Mutterers to replace them.. this is the cause of a lot of problems.
aug 29, 2025, 3:21 am • 8 0 • view
because while Mutterers are excellent engineers, they cannot really be told what to do in any meaningful way, meaning that there is essentially no standardization of high-tech equipment and machine tools, and virtually everything is subjected to repair and modification.
aug 29, 2025, 3:22 am • 10 0 • view
so while, e.g., industrial-age firearms are pretty common, the widely variable bores of indiviudal weapons mean that ammunition is all handmade. that and the fact that guilds control virtually all manufacturing mean that mass production is more or less a lost social technology.
aug 29, 2025, 3:23 am • 14 0 • view
so what was the long-term plan of the guys who genocided their engineers and replaced them with guys who don't take orders? because that doesn't seem like a great way to keep having a technological civilization
aug 29, 2025, 3:25 am • 0 0 • view
the Emperor appears to have wanted everyone to follow him into a black hole relatively shortly afterwards, but for reasons related to time dilation that has not quite worked out.
aug 29, 2025, 3:28 am • 6 0 • view
I became this in a recent OSR game I was in I had the Homunculus when playing as an Aurifex in Cairn 2e, and then my character died, so to continue playing I then took the Homunculus’ stats and the homunculus took over the body of my character
aug 29, 2025, 3:45 am • 0 0 • view