Originally posted by Sigg Oddra:
Ooo, Black War Projects of the Shattered Imperium.
I'll shelve the box next to LucasArts'
Secret Weapons of the Luftwaffe.
I think in any campaign remanants could have some interesting role to play. They don't always have to be in Cold Sleep. Perhaps some have used anagathics?
Here's some ideas:
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The Vandervecken. Because everyone loves a conspiracy with fanatic assassins, wealthy backers, and private armies, right? A pact of pro-development nobles on anagathics from the Third Imperium who studied history and evolution and concluded that big empires only lead to stagnation and spectacular losses of life with little gain. Small empires are better and the competition they foster speeds development along. Some have given up their titles. Others pull strings the strings of their descendants from the shadows of their noble houses. No few are nearly mad. Their goal is to consistently sabotage any large-scale effort to reunite the former TI. Remanant PCs could recognize one of the members, or be a defector.
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Omega. Killer robots! The shadow of the Ancients! During the Black War on some remote research station in Vland Sector, a group of scientists from the Third Imperium era found a way to repair and reactivate the stupendously destructive and resiliant robots left over from Grandfather's final war on Vland. When Vland seceeded from Lucan's Imperium a defector informed the Restored Ziru Sirka (RZS) about the development. A detachment of elite Vlandish commandos attacked the station to kill all the scientists there, but the scientists managed to activate one of the robots before the end. Even the partially activated robot was more than a match for the commandos. The robot's been repairing itself and reactivating its bretheren ever since. After years of living anonymously (as he or she narrowly avoided an execution order placed by the RZS to tie up loose ends and is still paranoid) in the backwaters of known space, our defector and remanant begins to wonder what happened to those robots. You can have great fun along the lines of Saberhagen's
Berserker or even weirder plots like psionically aware robots following orders older than the history of civilization of the current races to hunt down Droyne...and anyone who gets in their way. The robots would be individually powerful, but no match for the armies of 1248. So they'd engage in subterfuge - the perfect kind of thing for PCs to combat. Perhaps some of them look like humans now...
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CruRon 1446. Cliche, but fun. During the Black War, a BatRon featuring bleeding-edge Disintegrator spinal mounts, antimatter missiles, and highly experimental J6+ drives were sent out by one of the factions (Dulinor or Lucan most likely) to perform a decapitation strike. Adjust the technology to make their attack successful if the players fail (or at least very likely to succeed). The mission was considered to be a long shot suicide mission and only the most fanatic were chosen. The drives fail of course, and instead of misjumping through space, they misjump through time. They reappear in 1248 (or whatever year) with strange technology, intent on unleashing anti-matter bombardment on a world that's wealthy, peaceful, and totally unsuspecting. You can combine this with the
Vandervecken scenario above. Perhaps the Vandervecken found out about the fleet and decided it was a perfect tool, but the fleet was stuck in JumpSpace. In the patient way of men and women on anagathics, they've plowed Megacredits and decades into clandestine research into a way to make the experimental jump drives precipitate back from JumpSpace into RealSpace in a time of their choosing - or they've quickly put together a plan with only a few years and lots of talking to unrelated JumpSpace researchers on different worlds. Regardless, they've found what they think they need to know. Their assassins have killed all the physicists and military historians who know about the CruRon 1446. But no santitation job is ever complete, and a police inspector, a university TA, and a few military vets begin to piece together what's going from leftover lab notes and a trail of strange murders...but will it be enough to stop the Vandervecken and their Jump Lens? And what's to say something horrible hasn't happened to the crew of CruRon 1446 in the decades spent in JumpSpace?
