Phantom Thread

[BaconSoda]

Yeah, it's me, which means that this is a thread about Phantoms.

A lot of people say we're misguided and our goals are not readily apparent. Another one is that we're kind of metagaming, powergaming jerks. So, you know, I really want to try and show how we're not (or maybe we are, I don't think so, you can draw your own conclusions) and how we're trying to work to be not those kinds of gamers but how it's not really working as well as we'd like. I guess I'll divide the post into three strangely named sections:

1. What are Birds?
2. Refried Beans All Over my Plate
3. What Does it All Mean
4. Phantom Announcements

What are Birds

This part is not so important; this is our background and where we came from. There can be lots of colorful words here, but instead of boring you, I've decided to break it down into the most basic pieces. This is how I see it, and is rather an exposition of the original Phantom ideas.

In the beginning, there was DarkStar, an LSF Agent working somewhere in the Nomad Worlds. In the Nomad Worlds, he met some kind of alien race which may or may not have been Nomads, Klingons, the Eldar, the Zerg, or the C'Tan. Who it was doesn't matter, nor is it exactly known anymore. This alien race found DarkStar for two reasons: he was impressionable and capable.

This race had been watching our fledgling colony with little interest. They had more important matters to address than what seemed to be a very small human race. They had their own conflicts and their own empire to manage. Every so often, they would look back at the humans to see how quickly we had expanded and how voracious our appetite for expansion was. After the eight centuries of our colony expanding at an alarming rate, they deemed that before we were to become a threat to them, we would have to be subjugated. DarkStar was to be the one who would do this, though he would not know.

This race enticed DarkStar with a vision of unity and utopia. In the alien Empire, all races lived together in unity and equality, speaking a universal language, making unilateral scientific advancements, and forming a confederacy of independent states which all speak equally for themselves and for the empire they support. Whether or not that is true is unknown, but it sounds good to DarkStar, but what was even more important to him was the euthanasia of all Nomads and the reality of an unopposed human Sirius.

Though DarkStar had been swayed, the race was intelligent enough to realize that most humans would not be so easily convinced. In order to bring more people to DarkStar, they instructed him to tell of the race as gods, unseen but omniscient. The human race would eventually come to realize that this was a farce, but when given the alternative, the reason for farce would outweigh the sin of lying.

With the first promise of euthanasia, DarkStar deserted the LSF with his closest dozen confidants. As the Unseen Ones had instructed, they fled through the Nomad Worlds until they arrived in the desolate Omicron-82 system, where they were guided to a ready Temple of the Revenant. Inside, DarkStar was named Revenant of the Phantom Empire, holy prophet of the Unseen Ones, the station a temple devoted to his own worship and the worship of the Unseen Ones. From this hidden base, DarkStar and his confidants searched throughout Sirius looking for zealots for their holy cause.

This part is important. It is why we do things ingame and what our role is (loosely) defined by.

Those which have chosen to follow the Phantoms go through a phase called the Enlightenment. During this initiation, electrical impulses are sent through an unconscious brain to simulate real situations. This is training for a Phantom, ensuring his loyalty and devotion. Because of the enlightenment, every Phantom is the Revenant's zealot, serving in his holy rhetoric.

The rhetoric is very simple: create a temporary anarchy in Sirius. Once a temporary anarchy is made, the Unseen Ones become seen, coming in as a unifying force, annexing Sirius into its confederacy (or so the theory given is).

This is also why we don't share technology. Each piece of technology is rather a relic of the Unseen Ones, and just like the Knight's Templar cannot let an initiate hold a piece of the True Cross, we cannot let outsiders who have not been enlightened touch our technology.

Refried Beans All Over my Plate

Anarchy is nice and all, but how does being scary translate to anarchy? Well, lets talk about fear for a second. People feel two basic emotions due to instinct: fear and love, in that order of importance, coming from a need for survival and a need to reproduce, respectively. In the civilized world, we are removed from these two, creating strange combination and making up words for them like "content" and "relief", but most negative emotions are derivatives of fear (I'm afraid of this bully, therefore I hate him) and positive emotions are derivatives of love (I love that I am laughing, therefore I am happy with this TV show).

As the Phantoms, we want to remove people from civilization by making them feel absolute fear. Only when someone feels absolute fear can he absolutely love us by being relieved that we spared him. This kind of interaction is something which causes people to rethink their status quo. I don't know about you, but the last time I almost died, I was pretty upset and I rethought a lot. At this point, people start to point fingers, blaming Police and Navy organizations for not protecting them. People then begin to adopt revolutionary thoughts, such as those of the Blood Dragons or Bundschuh.

The point of the Phantom Empire is to instill enough doubt and fear in the House's populace that they do adopt these revolutionary ideals without actually fearing the revolutionaries or their motives. It is hard to support someone who thinks differently when he killed your brother, but when someone else killed your brother and the government does not think anything of it, someone who thinks differently looks much more appealing.

A revolution is anarchy. Once anarchy is established, a section of Sirius is available to our Unseen Masters to occupy. At this point, Sirius has its own resources to wage war on and subjugate itself.

What Does it All Mean

[color=#FF0000]This is more or less the important part of the post.

What we do not do is say we are something and then not put it in the game. We do not say we are elusive and then not be sneaky, taking lanes everywhere, we use backwater jump holes which are completely unused usually unless we are in a rush. We are not hard to kill because we say so, we are hard to kill because we run from engagements which we will probably lose. We are not scary because we say we are scary, we're scary because if you piss us off, we'll (try to) kill you. These are things we actually put into the game to portray what we really are.

One thing we would really like to do is publicize our actions (good and bad) more on the forum. It's not readily apparent to everyone that we actually do the kinds of things we do ingame. The medium through which we would do it, though, is the question. If implemented wrongly, it's not helpful at all, but if we can get an idea of what people like, we can make the RP more fulfilling for everyone and better integrate our RP into the mainstream flow of RP around the forum. A few ideas are:

• News Media
  
• Phantom Propaganda
  
• Using Junkers to Distribute Information (did not go neutral with them because of that)
  
• Posting in random unlawful watering holes about accomplishments
  

Some feedback on what would actually be appreciated and now labeled "powergaming" or "metagaming" would be nice. Additional ideas also appreciated.

Call it feeble justification, but the scariness actually does manifest itself ingame. It mostly manifests itself as killing things, embarrassing Navies, and cooperating with other wrong doers. We're pretty good at killing and embarrassing things, but as of late, people who haven't attacked us before have suddenly started attacking us. That has made cooperating for maximum scariness not so easy.

So, what I am going to assume is that somewhere, we dropped the ball and lost RP respect in the eyes of unlawful factions. I have always tried to do is take a common ground with other factions and show that we have common enemies. When the Blood Dragons are online, I like to try and find Samura to kill to show them that we have a common interest in dethroning the monstrous corporation. I have never tried to setup events with anyone because spontaneous RP is so much more impressive than planned RP.

This is not so easy. It, really, has not worked at all. If Samura are online, the Blood Dragons are not online. If the Blood Dragons are online, Samura is not online. If the Unioners are online, Republican is not online. If Republican is online, the Unioners are not online. It's incredibly difficult to do this kind of thing, and it just has not worked.

What we want to do is have planned cooperation. I'm not that big of a fan of it, but what we would like to do is earn back the respect of these unlawful factions by cooperating to achieve both of our goals. Brainstorms can be made in private, but we want to cooperate with the unlawful factions to help them succeed, because when they succeed, we succeed.

So, what we would like to know is who would actually do this? Who would want to cooperate with us and do fun things to solidify the common ground we could have?

Phantom Announcements

If you have not posted all of your characters here, do it now.

If you have not read this, do it now.

If you have not shot 40 Womprats in your Dune Speeder, do it now.

Fin.

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[8:32:45 PM] Dusty Lens: Oh no, let me get that. Hello? Oh it's my grandma. She says to be roleplay.
[12:49:19 AM] Elgatodiablo: You know its nice that you have all that proof and all, Bacon... but I just don't believe you.