Seriayne said;
IIRC that was just one type of anagathics, angath B, from the regency source book.
But other than that I am with you on the nobles, They may not have been my cup of tea, but the game lost something by making all nobles decadent layabouts.
There was that, and I seem to remember some rationale behind 'not letting corrupt immortals control the masses' - as one of the reasons for the Anagathics B thing. Nevermind that reasonably purestrain vilani will live 150-200+ years without any anagathics. Nevermind there are (or were) canon minor races who weren't particularly dumb/helpless that lived at least as long, or longer. The whole 'everyone specializes so the empire collapses like a house of cards in 75 years' thing didn't feel right.
There'd be survivors that wouldn't even be ancient geezers, who'd have been around and had clear memories from the 3rd Imperium, some even with the right bits and pieces of knowledge to rebuild. Someone has GOT to have a hard-copy of 6th millenia edition of "The Way Things Work" - a lot of someones in all likelihood. There would be a great deal of uncorrupted equipment, especially on worlds one or two tech levels behind the 'virus corrupts, no saving throw' tech level. There would be a LOT more able bodied resistance and internal innoculation than there seems to have been in TNE.
There wasn't enough -time- to get the full feel of re-exploring the 'wilds', and have them really be "Wild" or mysterious, or creepy except for the sense that there are killer robots everywhere. 75 years is enough time for two generations to grow up without experiencing how the 'old days were', but a lotta folks'd still be around to tell them how it was, preventing Thunderdome's orphan Lord of the Flies in most cases.
I think T4's Millieu 0 had the potential to do everything TNE woulda done, atmospherically, just with a general roadmap already laid out, however vague, how the next thousand years'd play out - unless the PC's helped skew the timeline, but if you don't want the 3rd Imperium (with its feudalism, romanticized noble class and decentralized 'control') coming out on top eventually, I can see how it wouldn't have been the option of choice for storytelling.
There were ancient (human/alien/AND Ancients) ruins, mostly untouched for centuries or even millenia, artifacts from breakneck Rule of Man research, pocket empires fighting back against the expanding Imperium, lost colonies, savagery, cultural drift (alien human cultures), salvage everywhere, a brewing worry whether or not Terra should be invited in or not before the Imperium had its proper growth spurt, the rise of the Julian Protectorate, the first 'Northwest Passage' (re)exploration and exploitation of the Marches. Of Antares. First Contact between scouts and the Hiver and K'kree. Lost colonies and
I just think recontact of Terra and the Easter Concordant et al, and the run-up and eventual campaigns of the Aslan Border Wars would have been really cool. - The first 'real perceived threat to humanity as a whole' right after the brightening of the Dawn coming out of the Long Night.
