by an A.I. emperor-core with "son" sub-units dispatched
to oversee the empire's outer reaches - every century or so the core
must be mostly-reset to undo the accumulation of mental errors, and then
the sub-units cannibalized to restore knowledge.
2
by a caste of transhuman aristocrats who claim that
they are a separate species from humanity, and that they are in fact
ancient aliens who taught the Mayans/Egyptians/etc.
3
by a central bank which presides over a general cartel
of mega-corporations that monopolize all significant industries and
services.
4
by a council of scientists representing every field of
study, who use the empire to experiment without limit or ethics and
develop new methods of technocratic control.
5
by a representative democracy that would be familiar to
our 21st-century selves - but the underlying culture's pretty dark and
fucked-up.
6
by a secret order of telepaths who control the minds of significant public figures as proxies and mouthpieces.
7
by a sapient, silico-magnetic hell which resides within
the mantle of their throne-world, demanding a tribute of organic minds
uploaded into its substrate for it and its most loyal, assimilated
servants to torment.
8
by a perpetual dictator who uses a bio-engineered virus
to convert succesors into exact physical and mental duplicates of
himself, and to warp dissidents into deranged hybrids.
9
by a primeval autonomous dreadnought unrivaled by any modern craft, with enigmatic designs on the galaxy.
10
by a mystery cult wherein higher rungs of government
correspond with deeper levels of initiation, which practices human
sacrifice and cannibalism and that sort of thing.
11
by a coalition of warlords and tyrants who work together for mutual defense and rebellion-crushing.
12
by way of cybernetically-enabled direct democracy,
though the voting system developed its own emergent intelligence and now
directs the citizenry to its own ends through manipulation of mass
psychology.
13
by the virtualized ghosts of its founders, their will absolutely unquestionable yet degraded into glitching senility.
14
by a hive-mind of precocious and sociopathic children created from samples discovered in an alien ruin.
15
by a eugenic elite born from pits of liquefied
gene-stuff, where only the most dominant and aggressive traits survive
to be shaped together into a new, whole organism.
16
by a fraternity of lich-lords jealously clinging to
power and life, stripped down to skeletal frameworks of tissue sustained
by machinery and fresh infusions and transplants.
17
by an inbred nexus of oligarch-families and their
associated mafias, all pretending to mythologized,
historically-revisionist nobility.
18
by the champion of a decennial gladiatorial tournament.
19
by a corrupt, decadent, and overgrown bureaucracy.
20
by oracles possessed by a deified madness, capable of
super-scientific miracles, each a receiver of a signal which "curves"
through higher-dimensional space.
D20
Among the evils of this space empire
1
is its workforce of lobotomized slave-legions.
2
is its use of false-flag attacks to scare its populace into compliance.
3
is sterilizing recalcitrant populations, and replacing them with ideologically-committed settlers.
4
is demanding that children be surrendered to it, so that they can be indoctrinated as battle-thralls.
5
is indiscriminate use of germ warfare.
6
is bombing an entire planet into a barren rock to exterminate a guerilla force.
7
is the time they gave a huge number of their own people to be processed as payment for an anthropophagous mercenary force.
8
is seeding civilian areas with robotic terror weapons.
9
is immortalizing their defeated enemies as agonized nerve-sculptures.
10
is baseless persecution of religious and ethnic groups.
11
is executing the relatives of criminals along with the criminal themself.
12
is testing its military systems on communities of its own poor.
13
is sponsoring terrorist groups to destabilize foreign governments.
14
is flagrant disregard for treaties and conventions.
15
is time-crime, attempted violations of causality that could potentially destroy the entire universe.
16
is doing a lot of assassinations.
17
is xenocide of a peaceful alien species.
18
are human, drug, organ, and weapon trafficking.
19
is harvesting brains to use as organic computers.
20
is hunting sapient beings for sport.
D20
Aesthetically, this evil space empire
1
resembles the Carnival of Venice, all masks, bright colours, and elaborate costumes and edifices.
2
is like a Greco-Roman Apple store, with a lot of predator drone-esque pale curves.
3
looks like Bruce Timm's Gotham.
4
is like it was designed by a chemically-castrated H.R. Giger.
5
leans heavily into sumptuary laws and class distinctions.
6
resembles the music video for Kanye West's song Power, but more sci-fi.
7
is like a bleak, twisted, rebranded version of The Jetsons for a new generation.
8
is like the lab in the 1931 Frankenstein movie extrapolated out into a whole civilization.
9
looks like gundams or evangelions but it's not giant robots just all their technology.
10
is like a visual kei BDSM club mixed with that Korean
cosmetic surgery clinic where they've got a pillar full of jaw shavings -
but not too much like Hellraiser because that's already been done.
11
is kind of like Zardoz but also kind of like
Self-Embodiment of Perfection from Jujutsu Kaisen, with a lot of giant
stone heads and other body parts in interlinked arrangements.
12
is somewhere between Jack Kirby space god stuff and the bad guys from Nemesis the Warlock.
13
is a weird, gaudy, pseudo-historical kludge like the Las Vegas Strip and also Neom in space.
14
is soy-core... pods, bugs, Klaus Schwab mantles, and suchlike... if you know, you know.
15
looks like the most racist man in the '80s' stimulant psychosis nightmare of an ascendant future Japan.
16
is the EPCOT Center plus the Event Horizon - and again, can't stress this enough, not too much like Hellraiser.
17
has got Paolo Soleri's sketches for its architecture and Thierry Mugler's designs for its fashion.
18
is kind of like the Empire in Warhammer 40k but Southern Gothic instead of regular Gothic.
19
is like a Pieter Bruegel the Elder painting mashed up with Kilian Eng.
20
is Orientalist Eiriel (deliriant realm reported by some on benadryl and suchlike).
D20
This evil space empire's territory
1
has shrunk significantly over the years, which they are
in denial about - outlying territories which used to pay them immense
tribute now pay only lip service.
2
is stretched thin across recent conquests.
3
is a web of strongholds with pockets of anarchy in between.
4
is enclosed by a wall of fortifications,
signal-jammers, and interceptors intended to prevent anything getting in
or out without the empire's approval.
5
is marked by gargantuan monuments.
6
is like a tensegrity structure - held together by internal oppositions and tensions more than conventional authority.
7
is scarred by war and terrible armaments.
8
is threatened along one border by an otherworldly devouring swarm.
9
has been recently expanded by a charismatic and popular
general who's coming to be perceived as a threat by the empire's
established powers.
10
is being sanctioned and blockades by an alliance of its foes.
11
is riven by a cold civil war.
12
has all its radio-frequencies bombarded with propaganda
24/7 - but this of course is in space so the number of hours in a day
and days in a week can vary from place to place.
13
is strip-mined and environmentally-devastated.
14
is deliberately kept harsh in the belief that this will toughen the citizenry up.
15
can actually be quite nice, if you're a well-off person in the garden-like core worlds.
16
is being drained of its wealth due to addiction to a
mutant strain of saffron they don't have the capacity to produce
domestically.
17
is lop-sided, presenting a weak front.
18
is so far constrained by natural barriers, but the empire works tirelessly to surmount them.
19
is dense, tight and heavily-developed.
20
is being shaken up by the rapid spread of a messianic religion among its lower classes.
D20
The most feared of this evil space empire's forces
1
are the crocotizones, emotionless reptilian hulks strong enough to tear the arms off a man like a leg off a roasted chicken.
2
are the Crimson Shrikes, an undefeated squadron of space-fighters.
3
is its inquisition, which is filled with sadistic spies and paranoiac torturers.
4
are its inhuman combat cyborgs.
5
is its 1st Expeditionary Fleet, the empire's crushing titanium fist.
6
are its stalking ghosts, warriors who've died yet returned.
7
is the Phalanx of the Outer Dark, a constellation of mobile killer satellites that rain death from an unreachable height.
8
are the deathalopods - uplifted, amphibious giant
squids used as hunter-killers - ingenious and nigh-inescapable once
they've got your trail.
9
is its hidden army - its disguised and refleshed infiltrators used as hitmen, saboteurs, and suicide bombers.
10
are the Skulltaker Commando Battalion, a special forces unit which leaves no trace but the mutilated bodies of their targets.
11
are its sentient computer viruses that can cripple infrastructure across an entire planet.
12
are the flayerdroids, programmed to adorn themselves with the skins of those they slay.
13
are its self-replicating shrieker drones, which adapt to the battlefield with each generation.
14
are its hordes of fearless, hateful berserker-clones.
15
are its carnivorous slime-molds, which attack in slithering floods and hazes of spores.
16
are its slaughter-savants, who use 99% of their brains for bloodshed.
17
are its inferno-troopers, who roast enemies alive and march within a firestorm.
18
are its laser-snipers, who can invisibly pick people
off from many miles away - though of course in space they may use a
different unit of measurement.
19
is its honour guard, drawn from the ranks of its most skilled and hardened soldiers.
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