I can certainly understand the desire to create Pocket Empires for the 1200-era. I've done it myself. I just wish that fewer of them made print. I don't see anything wrong with people making new PEs - it's an amount of setting customization I think is fantastic. I've made a Pocket Empire myself for that matter. That many of these are "canon" to some degree, especially by the later MJD materials is what makes space a bit crowded (and lame) to me.
Heh heh, yes, the Regency was a little too influenced by Nilsen's (and GDW's?) pro-democracy biases - hey the Berlin Wall had just come down IRL. Perhaps it did feel destined and right back then. My Regency was much different place - Norris was assassinated for one thing, so all that democracy stuff never occurred. Delphine took power ... at least for a while. Bad news.
Epi,
I can understand where you're coming from with the Hubworlds; what I see as stable and balanced can easily look boring from another angle. Don't you find the idea of living next to the Black Curtain interesting though? I like the sense of brooding horror it creates: nothing comes out, and anything that goes in is never heard from again. It's funny that you identify your take on virus as heresy; as Aramis points out, by the time TNE sees print, Nilsen turns the quote I used on it's head and the game could've easily been renamed "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Virus." Congratulations, you turned out to be orthodox! Given what you did with your campaign, were you happy with the whole Sandman incident?
The Black Curtain was (and is) my campaign's land of despair. It's like the lovechild of a tryst between Tolkien's Mordor and the 01 sequences from the third Matrix movie. It's not a nice place. It's a gathering place "for the Machine Intelligences, by the Machine Intelligences, to the Machine Intelligences." Up until just recently, biological lifeforms were tolerated in the Black Curtain, provided they didn't leave their planets atmosphere in any, way, shape, or form (including launching satellites). If you did, they'd come and bomb you. Then about two decades ago, they bombed flat every planet that was emitting radio chatter ("hey, you kids, turn down your radios!" "if the music's too loud, you're too -- *BLAM BLAM BLAM*"). Within the last five years, the machines have snuffed out every world with intelligent life on it, suggesting a dangerous shift in politics within the Black Curtain.
There actually
is a HubWorlds in my game, but they're smaller and a lot more furitive - they have a few recently once-habitable planets that look like our moon today, except a lot more radioactive to show what happens when they attract attention to themselves. They live a much more covert existence - underground cities, radio emissions are carefully controlled in favor of hardwired landlines on the surface, ships are carefully rationed, and so on. They scour the skies with powerful telescopes and similar sensors and send ships out only when they don't see machine starships. The HWs are disturbed by the recent trend since the Machines seemed content to only do cursory inspections before and many of the dead planets within the curtain were nascent trading partners. The HWs have sent some ships with large fuel tankage for observation missions into the Black Curtain and have figured out how the AIs prevent stuff from moving around - fuelling points and likely jump-in points are under 24/7/365 lockdown by Virus warships, an increasing number of which are totally new designs and were not designed for crews - at least of living beings.
The observer ships from the HW haven't gone in too far (maybe 5 parsecs at most from one "side" of the Curtain area) but they've already seen some disturbing things:
* The AIs are starting construction on Criswell structures around dwarf stars in the earliest stages of construction and HW analyists think it'll take centuries maybe millenia for them to be finished at the slow rate of construction but timeframes like that don't seem to bother the Machines at all.
* One system had hundreds of massive solar collector "disks" in the life zone whose surface area is measured in hundreds of thousands of square kilometers but less than one millimeter thick serviced by colonies of trillions of tiny robots about the size of a house spider.
* A few systems have a near solid ring of relic Vampire ships in very tight orbits deep in the gravity wells of collapsed stars systematically deconstructing themselves and assembling themselves into something ... else. Other planets previously recorded in Imperial times as not having rings now have them.
* Gas giants orbitted by what observers refer to as "dervishes" - millions of slender "T"-shaped spires about a kilometer long but only a few meters thick that spin at astonishing rates on the order of thousands of RPM that randomly send out intense bursts of radio chatter. The spinning isn't "constant" and they slow or speed up, or even wander in large circles even as they spin, like ecstatic religious dancers or ice skaters, yet the entire thing seems coordinated, like a gigantic, never-ending ballet in close orbit over a gas giant.
* Earthlike planets where nothing but animals and plants live on land in new virgin forests and in the ruins of once-proud human cities, but at night the oceans are filled with eeriely symmetric patterns of phosphoresce suggestive of intelligent direction on a global scale.
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The Sandman incident was a little cheesy and easy for me. It does occur however. The Sandman Collective (what, did you think it was dumb enough to put all its eggs into one basket and go with the humans, no it hedged its bet and copied itself) goes with the humans, plays nice. The stresses within RC society threaten to rip it apart. Baldur flat out refuses to deal with the AIs and threatens secession or military action. Nike Nimbus follows. There's a split amongst the technarchs of Oriflamme - some pro, some anti.
A suicide bomber eventually kills Sandman to make a political statement - a photogenic female human Aubani RCES officer, highly decorated and a former member of the Ashtabula crew makes a recorded statement apologizing to her friends and family for her act, but explaining that she would die before seeing AIs let into the RC. Maggart does the things described in
Vampire Fleets anyway, citing a "higher moral imperative."
Ultimately, however, two large Vampire Fleets (dubbed Nemesis and Alastor) sweep in. Apparently one of the AIs either experienced a change of heart or there was a mole amongst the AIs granted citizenship. Nobody knows. What is known is that the Vampire Fleets, when they arrive, have very detailed information on the capacities and quantities of RC ships as well as their deployement...
